Panasonic and Sony have jointly announced a new standard for professional-use optical discs. The announcement follows the signing of an agreement between the two electronics giants in July 2013. Named Archival Disc, the new storage medium will be capable of storing a minimum of 300 gigabytes per disc. In addition, both companies plan to leverage their respective technologies to further expand the recording capacity per disc to 500GB and 1TB. Availability of the 300GB discs is slated for summer 2015.

Sony Press Release

"Archival Disc" standard formulated for professional-use next-generation optical discs

Sony Corporation
Panasonic Corporation

Tokyo, Japan - March 10, 2014 - Sony Corporation ("Sony") and Panasonic Corporation ("Panasonic") today announced that they have formulated "Archival Disc", a new standard for professional-use, next-generation optical discs, with the objective of expanding the market for long-term digital data storage*.

Optical discs have excellent properties to protect themselves against the environment, such as dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored. They also allow inter-generational compatibility between different formats, ensuring that data can continue to be read even as formats evolve. This makes them robust media for long-term storage of content. Recognizing that optical discs will need to accommodate much larger volumes of storage going forward, particularly given the anticipated future growth in the archive market, Sony and Panasonic have been engaged in the joint development of a standard for professional-use next-generation optical discs.

These efforts resulted in the formulation of "Archival Disc", a new professional-use next-generation optical disc standard, for which the technology roadmap, logo, and specifications are outlined below.

* Basic agreement to jointly develop a standard for professional-use next generation optical discs originally announced on July 29, 2013

Roadmap

Both Sony and Panasonic aim to launch systems with a recording capacity of 300GB per disc from summer 2015, onwards. In addition, both companies plan to leverage their respective technologies to further expand the recording capacity per disc to 500GB and 1TB.

Logo

The following logo has been designed to represent the "Archival Disc" professional-use next-generation optical disc standard.

In recent times, demand for archival capabilities has increased significantly in the film industry, as well as in cloud data centers that handle big data, where advances in network services have caused data volumes to soar.

Both Sony and Panasonic have successful experience working on the development of Blu-ray Disc™ technology. The two companies plan to actively promote this next-generation high-capacity optical disc standard in the professional field in order to offer an effective solution for protecting valuable data into the future.

Key Archival Disc specifications

Disc size (type) 300 GB (write-once)
Optical parameter Wavelength λ=405 nm (nanometers), Numerical Aperture NA=0.85
Disc structure Double-sided Disc (3 layers/side), Land and Groove Format
Track pitch 0.225μm (micrometers)
Data bit length 79.5nm (nanometers)
Error correction method Reed-Solomon Code

Crosstalk cancellation technology*1 and high-order Partial Response Maximum Likelihood (PRML) signal processing technology*2 have been employed to achieve both larger capacity and higher playback signal quality.

*1 This technology electrically removes crosstalk from the adjacent tracks that increase as the track pitch becomes narrower, to achieve high-quality playback performance.
*2 PRML is a signal processing technology that improves reproduction performance by allowing inter-symbol interference.
* Company names and/or product names mentioned in this document are trademarks or registered trademarks of the respective corporations.

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