Optical data destruction system: device design and test results
Taeyoung Choi, Tom D. Milster, David Felix, Warren L. Bletscher, Delbert Hansen · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2008
An optical data destruction system using a high power laser beam is introduced. The system exposes data marks on optical media to a focused high power line beam. The exposure changes the physical and optical properties of the data marks and surrounding layers, making retrieval of the data impossible. Maintaining the focused laser beam on a data layer is achieved by a focus servo using a diffractive optical element (DOE). The system performance is evaluated from a number of destruction experiments on CD-Recordable (CD-R) and CD-ReWritable (CD-RW).