German Start-Up Syylex Prepares Archiving Optical Disc

Syylex AG is a new venture born in April 2011 and based in Villingen-Schwenningen, Germany, that intends to produce GlassMasterDisc, an archiving optical disc the size of a DVD based on an engraved glass substrate.

The media is supposed to be archived 100 years or more and seems to be based on a technology not far form the Century Disc from Digipress/Plasmon OMT.

Other firms working on archiving data media include:

• Melbourn, Hertfordshire-based Plarion, with on an optical disc for long-term archiving, whose CEO is Bob Longman, previously technical director of defunct Plasmon
• Millenniata in American Fork, UT with M-DISC
• Northern Star Spol in Praha, Czech Republic with DataTresorDisc
  Institute of Information Recording Problems, NASU, in Kiev, Ukraine
• Japanese Panasonic with BD-R for "50 to 100 years"
• Essilex in Paris, France, and
• General Storage and Technology in Oslo, Norway, whose CTO Erik Solhjell was formerly CTO of Tandberg Data

There are many ideas for a very promising sector but we are waiting to see a product gaining any significant market – but former Plasmon UDO now handled by Alliance Storage Technologies in USA.

According to MOS Magazine, Syylex’s founders are president Rolf Wagner, as well as Heiko Trautner, Stephan Knappman and Harmut Richter, apparently all of them coming from now-closed Thomson R&D center in Villingen.

If the new firm can get enough financial funding to build automatic production machines, it could launch discs this summer with the goal to produce 20,000 media per year, reported a local German paper.