Fred Thomas
Articulated Optical DVD
Technology
COMPUTING AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS
Engineer and inventor Fred C. Thomas was born
on October 25, 1959 in Washington D.C. With his
diplomat parents he traveled and lived all over
the world, including time spent in Pakistan,
South Vietnam, India, Taiwan, Germany and the
Philippines, as well as the United States. His
father had been an electrical engineer earlier in
his career, and it was he who inspired his son’s
interest in technology, especially solar energy.
When the younger Thomas began to see media
coverage of innovations that were very similar
to ideas he had years earlier, he realized he
might have a special talent for developing new
technological concepts. He entered Bucknell
University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania where he
completed his BS in Mechanical Engineering in
1983.
That year, Thomas began working for Texas Instruments Defense Systems
in Dallas, first as an electro-optics systems engineer and later as manager
of the Laser Ranging Systems Test Group. There he was responsible for a
number of innovations related to testing and analysis. He parlayed this
experience into his own business, Prototype Devices, which he operated
until 1991. Meanwhile, he completed his MS in Mechanical Engineering at
Bucknell in 1990.
In 1991, Thomas joined the Iomega Corporation, working his way up from
mechanical product design engineer, to Chief Technologist in the Advanced
R&D division. At Iomega, Thomas has become one of the most prolific
innovators in the company’s 25-year history, with more company
inventions to his credit than any other employee. He has over 32 patents on
technologies developed for the organization.
One of Thomas’ first projects for the company was the LightSaber laser
servowriter, which was honored with the 1994 Electro-Optic Application of
the Year Award from Laser Focus World magazine. Thomas was responsible
for the electro-optic design on the device, which made possible very high
density storage by using an acousto-optically controlled argon-ion laser to
etch more than 1.5 million servo marks on a 3.5-inch Floptical disk.
As Iomega Corporation's all-time leading inventor, over the last decade
Thomas has been responsible for such advances as TrueLuminous
technology - which uses glow-in-the-dark materials (phosphors) to
identify and authenticate data storage cartridges and other articles -- as
well as critical components of Iomega products such as the Floptical Drive,
Zip Drive, Jaz Drive, Peerless Drive and REV Drive. Thomas was also one of
the original inventors of the company’s micro-magnetic data storage
technology, the Clik! drive, that was later renamed the Pocket Zip. For one
of these developments, Thomas received one of Iomega’s prestigious
“Exceptional Invention Awards.”
The types of removable data storage products Iomega builds involve the
“interplay of several technologies and engineering sciences,” Thomas said,
including electronics, mechanisms, dynamics of spinning bodies, plastics,
magnetics, precision actuators, sensors and motors, among others.
“Inventing is all about bringing as big and varied a set of technologies and
new materials to bear on a challenging problem as possible,” said Thomas.
One of his most exceptional inventions is AO-DVD technology. The "AO" in
AO-DVD stands for "Articulated Optical,” a term that describes the tilted
orientation of small reflective facets in the surface of data storage elements
found on a DVD-like, plastic data storage disc. With typical DVD technology,
a small, focused spot of laser light is reflected from the DVD disc's surface.
In that area, roughly equivalent to the focused laser spot's size, one bit of
data is stored. That area either reflects a lot of light or just a little light.
Hence, there are two-levels (1 or 0) stored in that small location on the DVD
disc.
With AO-DVD, however, a new enabling technology called “e-beam
mastered gray-scale lithography” gives this same small area of the disc
some predefined three-dimensional reflective topography. That way, not
only can one control whether the spot reflects back or not (like DVD), but
one can split the reflected laser beam back into multiple paths with each
path having a unique positional and phase orientation, or state, relative to
all the other reflective paths. By using an appropriate electronic detection
scheme, one can encode thousands, if not millions, of different states in the
same area used by a DVD to record just two states. Using this mechanism,
future optical distribution discs such as the AO-DVD could potentially hold
50-100 times more information than today's DVDs at similarly low costs.

Iomega has reduced investment into new optical data storage
technologies, thus, according to Thomas, AO-DVD is still in want of
corporate support to bring it to market. It is an idea that is a bit ahead of its
time.

Source (2022): https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/fred-thomas