Characterization of optical disks

One key element of an optical storage system is the recording medium. An important part of the successful development of media technology are the various techniques for characterization of the media. In this paper, several techniques are described with spatial resolutions ranging from millimeters to microns. It is shown that useful information concerning the performance of the media can be derived without actual recording and playback. These techniques are obviously of extreme importance when the recording technology is based on a nonerasable write-once read-only type of media.