Abstract
Near-field recording using an actuated solid immersion lens is an attractive solution for a next-generation optical storage product. By applying advanced servo techniques, like feed forward control and active disc tilt detection and compensation, robust and reliable servo operation can be ensured, even at high disc rotation speeds. Furthermore, using media with a protective cover-layer has a number of important advantages. As demonstrated in this paper, crucial advantages are superior data protection and robustness, which are essential for realizing a reliable product. Using a lens with a numerical aperture (NA) of 1.45 and discs with a 3 µm polymer cover-layer, very good recording results are obtained at tangential densities up to 36.5% more than the nominal NA-scaled density. These results strongly indicate that capacities over 100 GB per layer are feasible in this system.