InPhase Technologies

» see inphase-tech.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Holographic storage was the storage industry's permanent next thing. Rather than write bits along a track on the surface of a disc, you would write them as interference patterns through the full depth of a photopolymer, thousands of pages of data stacked inside the same physical volume and read back by shining a reference beam through it. The capacity arithmetic was extraordinary and the engineering was brutal, and for about a decade the photopolymer work that mattered belonged to Bell Labs.

InPhase Technologies was spun out of Bell Labs in 2000 to turn the research into a product. It set up in Longmont, Colorado, and spent its first four years working through the manufacturing problems of a library system: a thousand pieces of media, and a robot to move any one of them into a drive. In February 2008 it was granted a joint patent with Nintendo covering a scanner for angle-based multiplexing. That May it announced the Tapestry 300r, a 300 gigabyte drive running at 20 megabytes a second, with a roadmap promising an order of magnitude more across two further generations.

The drive had already been promised for late 2006, then for February 2007. It was promised again after that. Every slip cost staff, and every slip also cost the comparison, because what InPhase was really racing was the price per gigabyte of ordinary magnetic disk, which fell every year without needing a breakthrough to do it.

By 2009 the company could fairly claim it had beaten the areal density of commercial magnetic media. By early 2010 it could not make payroll.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the locks ~

The Register reported on 8 February 2010 that the Colorado Department of Revenue had seized the InPhase premises for non-payment of taxes, changed the locks, and announced that everything the company owned, including the furniture and fittings, would be sold at auction. The sixty or so remaining staff had been laid off the week before. The chief executive and one of the investors were still talking about additional funding, which the paper noted now looked unlikely.

The company stopped operating at that point. Disposing of what it owned took another two years.

~ what the assets became ~

In March 2010 Signal Lake, one of the two venture funds behind InPhase, took a majority stake in what was left. Bart Stuck of Signal Lake spent the next year and a half trying to restart the thing, buying holographic media manufacturing equipment from Hitachi Maxell in Tokyo and, in 2011, the assets of DSM AG in Westerstede, Germany. The other fund, Acadia Woods, wanted the assets auctioned instead. The disagreement went to court in Boulder County, and Signal Lake won it.

InPhase filed for Chapter 11 in October 2011. The Register's account of the money put it at 94 million dollars raised across five rounds, against debts of 2.08 million and an estimated asset value somewhere between 50 and 100 million. The largest creditor was a Denver law firm. The company never emerged from the process. Everything was auctioned in March 2012, and Acadia Woods moved the intellectual property and most of the equipment into a new company called Akonia Holographics, which launched that August with about 11 million dollars behind it.

Akonia gave up on storage and used the same photopolymer expertise on waveguide displays for augmented reality glasses. Apple bought Akonia in 2018. So the holographic recording work that began at Bell Labs in the 1990s is still being done somewhere, just not on anything shaped like a disc.

~ the buyers it needed ~

The buyer for a drive like this was a broadcast archive or a data center, and the price was never printed anywhere public. No part of that selling process ends on a shelf a person can walk up to, which is why holographic storage stayed an industry promise instead of a product anybody could own. For most of us it came no closer than a magazine page, usually a page or two from something about HD DVD.

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