It's quite a well known fact that we owe science in general and researchers in particular just about everything that we see around us nowadays, especially when talking about electronics. Indeed, it takes a while to translate a scientific discovery into consumer-grade products, but we certainly hope that this will happen in the case of the latest discovery made by Xiang Zhang, a UC Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering, and his team.
They managed to combine metal lenses that focus light through the excitation of electrons – or plasmons – on the surface of the lens with a "flying head" that resembles the stylus or the arm of an old-fashioned LP turntable, thus creating line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds of up to 12 meters per second.
"Utilizing this plasmonic nanolithography, we will be able to make current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful," said Zhang. "This technology could also lead to ultra-high density disks that can hold 10 to 100 times more data than disks today."This whole development is based on the optical lithography process, in which light is transferred through a mask with the desired circuit pattern onto a photosensitive material, or photoresist, that reacts chemically when exposed. The material thus obtained is then "dipped" into a series of baths containing various chemicals, the ultimate goal of this process being to etch the circuit design onto a wafer.
What the engineers from Berkeley did was to design a silver plasmonic lens with concentric rings that concentrated the light to a hole in the center where it exited on the other side. In the experiment, the hole was less than 100 nanometers in diameter, but it would seem that it can theoretically be as small as 5 to 10 nanometers. The researchers packed the lenses into a flying plasmonic head, called so because it would "fly" above the photoresist surface during the lithography process. And apparently, this flying head could hold up to a whopping 100,000 lenses, enabling parallel writing for even faster production.
"I expect in three to five years we could see industrial implementation of this technology," Zhang added. "This could be used in microelectronics manufacturing or for optical data storage and provide resolution that is 10 to 20 times higher than current blu-ray technology."

We expected LG’s new 6x external Blu-ray burner to perform similarly to the company’s GBW-H20L internal offering, what with the two having identical read/write speed ratings, but we were wrong. The external drive is a bigger, more expensive letdown.
Like the GBW-H20L, the BE06 external model boasts an industry-leading 6x BD-R write rating. And here the latter performed accordingly, writing 22GB of data to a single-layer BD-R disc in a brisk 22:43 (min:sec)In BD-RE writes, however, the BE06 faltered—badly. Boasting the same 2x rating for rewriteable media as the GBW-H20L, the BE06 took more than twice as long as that drive to write 22GB of data to a BD-RE disc—a full hour and 28 minutes! That’s actually slower than just about any Blu-ray burner we’ve tested in recent memory. Not good.

The BE06 redeemed itself with DVD-R writes. The drive is rated at 16x and was able to write 4.38GB to a single-layer disc in 5:42—a second faster than the LG GBW-H20L. The drives were as closely matched on DVD-R reads.

While there’s something to be said for the convenience of an external drive with a USB 2.0 interface, this is offset by the BE06’s gargantuan size. The enclosure is nearly 3 inches longer and an inch wider than its internal brethren—and $100 more expensive. Blu-ray is a tough enough sell as it is without tacking on this drive’s compromises. We’re unimpressed.