Designers at InPhase Technologies, Longmont, Colo., needed a chip for their holographic storage drive, the world’s first of its kind.

They found a solution with a high-speed, custom complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) camera chip developed by Cypress Semiconductor Corp., San Jose, Calif.

The InPhase prototype demonstrates a new generation of storage-well beyond DVD, magnetic tape and disk. Holographic storage delivers high capacity by recording data with laser flashes throughout the volume of the recording material, and not just on the surface.

The Cypress chip, an ultrasensitive and ultrafast CMOS image sensor, will enable high-speed reading of data (at 500 frames per second) recorded by the InPhase Tapestry drive.

The Cypress CMOS imager features a digital interface and is sized with a pixel count of 1696 ´ 1710 and a pixel pitch of 8 microns. The InPhase Tapestry drive will direct the frame of data to enable a faster readout of information. For more information, see www.cypress.com.

The initial InPhase Tapestry product will hold 300 gigabytes of data with a transfer rate of 20 megabytes per second-ideal for high-definition recording on a single disk. InPhase is targeting archive needs in commercial markets such as professional video, regulatory compliance, medical imaging, satellite imaging, and scientific applications where the need for long-term, secure and cost-effective archives of massive amounts of digital data is a critical issue.