High-speed, acousto-optically addressed optical memory

A page-oriented, angle-multiplexed volume holographic optical-memory recording system has been constructed. This memory is addressed by the use of an acousto-optic deflector with a random-access time of 16 µs per page. This enables data transfer rates of 5.28 Gbits/s when pages of binary data are being stored. The reconstruction quality of images stored as memory pages is assessed with the quality achieved with the acousto-optic device compared with that achieved with the original recording optics.