Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Purdue University innovators have created technology aimed at replacing Morse code with colored “digital characters” to modernize optical storage. They are confident the advancement will help with the explosion of remote data storage during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
[...] Rather than using the traditional dots and dashes as commonly used in these technologies, the Purdue innovators encode information in the angular position of tiny antennas, allowing them to store more data per unit area.
"The storage capacity greatly increases because it is only defined by the resolution of the sensor by which you can determine the angular positions of antennas," said Alexander Kildishev, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in Purdue's College of Engineering. "We map the antenna angles into colors, and the colors are decoded."
[...]This new development not only allows for more information to be stored but also increases the readout rate.
"You can put four sensors nearby, and each sensor would read its own polarization of light," Kildishev said. "This helps increase the speed of readout of information compared to the use of a single sensor with dots and dashes."
Future applications for this technology include security tagging and cryptography. To continue developing these capabilities, the team is looking to partner with interested parties in the industry.
Journal Reference:
Maowen Song, Di Wang, Zhaxylyk A. Kudyshev, et al. Enabling Optical Steganography, Data Storage, and Encryption with Plasmonic Colors, Laser & Photonics Reviews (DOI: 10.1002/lpor.202000343)
(Score: 4, Touché) by shortscreen on Thursday February 04 2021, @09:18AM (1 child)
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this has nothing to do with Morse code. Maybe the symbols in the relevant binary optical storage scheme are referred to as "dots and dashes" but that doesn't make it Morse code, which isn't really binary because it also has spaces in between strings.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 04 2021, @04:26PM
They aren't. The physical features on "normal" optical discs are called pits and lands (and of course the coded data itself is just discussed as binary digits or decimal or hex or BCD or analog composite video signals or whatever notation is convenient).
Optical disc technology is a bit of a strange thing. People seem to constantly be "inventing" new optical storage methods yet 40+ years later in the real world, our optical discs are essentially exactly the same technology that was introduced with LaserDisc in 1978, just miniaturized and using shorter wavelengths of light.