Inventor of the Week: Archive
This Week | Inventor Archive | Inventor Search

Inventor of the Week Archive
Browse for a different Invention or Inventor

AO-DVD
Engineer-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 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 B.S. 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 M.S. 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
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/thomasf/My%2...or%20Docs/Inventor%20of%20the%20Week%20Archive.htm (1 of 3)4/21/2005 12:46:38 PM
Inventor of the Week: Archive
company inventions to his credit than any other employee. He has at
least 32 patents issued and more than 20 pending 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.
In recent years 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. Thomas, meanwhile, continues to work on
technologies to improve Iomega's removable hard platter disk cartridge
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/thomasf/My%2...or%20Docs/Inventor%20of%20the%20Week%20Archive.htm (2 of 3)4/21/2005 12:46:38 PM
Inventor of the Week: Archive
products (REV). Some of these improvements include better ways to
clean highly sensitive components, and methods for reducing effects of
external and internal vibrations. Thomas is also committed to educating
young people in scientific and technological concepts. In fact, he runs
his own educational Web site, Units of Measure.com: Perspectives in
Science and Technology.
[November 2004]
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT School of Engineering

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/thomasf/My%2...or%20Docs/Inventor%20of%20the%20Week%20Archive.htm (3 of 3)4/21/2005 12:46:38 PM