Microsoft has revealed a significant advancement in commercializing Project Silica, its initiative to inscribe information onto glass for long-lasting archival purposes. The firm has now adapted the inscription method to function with the borosilicate glass commonly employed in oven doors.
Earlier iterations of Project Silica relied on a proprietary fused glass variety suitable for lab experiments but inadequate for widespread adoption. The latest development enables compatibility with borosilicate glass, the material in products like Pyrex cookware.
The core principles of Project Silica stay unchanged. Its primary objective is to create a durable storage solution capable of preserving data for more than 10,000 years without deterioration. Demonstrations have included embedding full-length films such as Superman onto glass plates, along with preserving audio recordings for posterity.
Traditional archival formats are prone to issues like data corruption, affecting devices from hard disk drives to optical discs such as DVDs and rewritable media. After initial explorations with DNA-based data storage, Microsoft shifted focus to Project Silica in 2019. The system holographically imprints information into thin 2mm glass layers, and this approach persists, though the glass type is now more readily obtainable on the market.
Although Microsoft declared the conclusion of the Silica research period, it provided no timeline for manufacturing rollout. In a recent blog entry, the company mentioned it would evaluate insights gained from its findings. The outcomes were detailed in a fresh publication within the journal Nature.
Additionally, Microsoft highlighted improvements in the data inscription process. Moving beyond glass polarization for encoding, the team now employs 'phase voxels' that leverage alterations in the glass's phase. This allows for simultaneous creation of numerous voxels. For polarization-based methods, the procedure has been streamlined to require only two pulses.
Microsoft further reported integrating machine learning techniques to refine data symbol representations and to forecast potential degradation patterns within the glass over time.
Naturally, future generations millennia ahead must possess the means to retrieve this information. One can only wish that Silica glass avoids the fate of outdated 21st-century storage relics like Zip drives.