Optical recording material requirements

TABLE I. Typical Requirements of the Optical Recording Material... 

In Section II we describe some applications for refractive-index recording materials, with particular emphasis on the basic optical concepts and the required material characteristics. 

JL olymers are increasingly being used in a wide variety of applications in electronics and photonics, most of which use polymers in their traditional role as engineering materials (e.g., circuit boards, molded products, wire and cable insulation, encapsulants, and adhesives). In addition, many other unique applications require material properties that only polymers can provide. Examples include resist materials for the lithographic fabrication of integrated circuits (1C) and polymers for optical recording. These types of applications may be considered passive in the sense that the polymer does not play an active role in the operation of the device or circuit. Rather, it serves some other function such as mechanical support, electrical insulation, or in the case of resists, some intermediate function in the fabrication of the device. 

The largest volume use of polymers in optical recording media is in the disk substrate. A schematic of a typical double-sided disk substrate is shown in Figure 1.38, which illustrates the properties required of the substrate material ... 

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