Optical Drive Technologies

Before working at Optics for Hire several of our engineers worked on optical drive technologies. Starting in the late 1970’s they lead and worked on programs creating equivalents of the laser disc, CD, and CDR formats. These were commercialized in the former USSR.

In the late 1990’s these same engineers worked on multi layer optical media drives for the former Constellation 3D. We have continued to work in optical data storage systems, most recently with Holigraphic data storage and the LaserCard format.

In the chart below some of the key technologies developed by the optical design team are described and projects from the last 30 years are listed.

Technology Developed Project, Application


1. Focus servo system
2. Tracking servo system
3. Disc tilt servo compensation system
4. Disc rotation stabilization/or control system
5. Pickup head radial moving servo
6. Read only pickup optics
7. Read/write pickup optics
8. Focusing objective
9. Objective suspension
10. Voice coil motors for focusing and tracking servos
11. Optical sensors for focusing, tracking, tilt, rotation and other servos
12. Laser collimators and beam shapers
13. Stabilized power sources for gas and semiconductor lasers
14. Semiconductor laser drivers for optical writing
15. Beam wave front correction for multilayer discs (dynamical spherical aberration correction)
16. Layer recognizing system for multilayer discs and cards
17. Optical drive microprocessor control hardware and software
18. Decoders/ encoders of read/write information using different standards
19. Photo receiving optical assemblies and low-noise front-end amplifiers for optical signals about 5…30 nW, up to 40 MHz.
20. Front-end signal processors for WORM systems
21. Custom test drives for investigation of laboratory disc samples readability, write-ability, optical sensitivity, modulation capability
22. Custom optical measuring equipment for industrial disc production lines
23. Custom test equipment for industrial drive production lines
24. Custom manufacturing equipment for multilayer disc production line.
25. Laboratory breadboards for optical pickup prototyping, assembling, tuning, and testing
26. Laboratory breadboards for WORM media investigations
27. Supervision of custom components and system manufacturing
28. WORM media writing strategy


1. Disc mastering station (laser beam recorder)
2. VLP Video disc player, (laserdisc type format)
3. CD player
4. WORM drive (CD-R )
5. Optical card drive, (LaserCard Format)
6. Ni-stamper technological player, (test equipment for nickel stampers)
7. FMD CD drive (fluorescent multilayer disc)
8. FMD DVD drive
9. FMD WORM drive
10. Nitrocellulose WORM discs
11. Holigraphic optical storage drives