Japan's Optware Corp. and five partners announced that they would form the Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) Alliance to accelerate development and standardization of the HVD system.

Optware's partners are: CMC Magnetics Corp., Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd.; Nippon Paint Co. Ltd.; Pulstec Industrial Co. Ltd.; and Toagosei Co. Ltd. The effort officially kicks off this spring.

Optware developed collinear holographic technology based on its proprietary servo system. Conventional hologram recording requires a signal and reference beams. This makes the system too bulky for use in an optical disk system.

Collinear technology employs one beam which integrates the reference and signal beams. This allows for an optical disk system similar to present CD/DVD disk systems. Using a 120- mm diameter disk using a reflection layer with pre-pit address, collinear holographics becomes more like current optical disk systems but provides greater capacity of at least 200 Gbytes.

The alliance jointly proposed the collinear technology based holographic information storage disk to Ecma International. The group will create a new technical committee to tackle standards for holographic storage systems initially based upon Optware's proprietary collinear technology.

"We are aiming at a de jour standard, not a de facto standard," said Yoshiko Aoki, president and CEO of Optware.

The technical committee will hold its first meeting next month in Tokyo. On its agenda are specs for HVR-R (write once) with 200-Gbyte capacity, ROM HVD with 100-Gbyte capacity, 30-Gbyte holographic cards and an optional version for ROM disks.