InPhase out of business, auctioning off assets

InPhase out of business, assets seized for back taxes -- Engadget

InPhase had been working on holographic disc technology for the last 10 years, but apparently they haven't been paying their taxes... Now, somewhere in Colorado, there are a buttload of 1W green lasers at a government auction.

Anyone here live in CO?

Oh Chuck, we need to start an auction fund and send somebody to buy the goodies at low prices right now!! Then raffle them, etc. etc.

pseudolobster said:

InPhase out of business, assets seized for back taxes -- Engadget

InPhase had been working on holographic disc technology for the last 10 years, but apparently they haven't been paying their taxes... Now, somewhere in Colorado, there are a buttload of 1W green lasers at a government auction.

Anyone here live in CO?

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Hi Pseudolobster,
I'm about 4 miles from the InPhase facility and know a couple of the engineers who worked there. Drove by there yesterday and the letter on the door says the state will post a notice on the door about the auction when it happens.
As far as 1 Watt green lasers, none there. I was told by on of the fellows working there that it's all low powered high precision melles griott & coherent stuff. Their product was going to be a hologram based hard drive and they're not going to be putting a 1Watt laser in a hard drive system, they just need to mark the media much like a CD/DVD writer, not melt a hole through the whole disk. I'll see if I can find out the exact details or model numbers, but I wouldn't expect any lasers over 100 to 150mw to be had. There will be some optical tables, flow benches, isolation tables and lots of optical & electrical test equipment that will be auctioned (if it hasn't already been stolen by employees who have been working for free for some time now).
I've been to a state auction before here and it was not an online auction and it was cash/ check only (no credit cards). I'll post when I here more and if you're near Colorado, it might be worth the trip to pick up a good meter, scope or optical bench setup.

..not melt a hole through the whole disk..

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haha

This is fantastic news. I'm glad to hear someone lives close enough they may be able to get in on the auction.

bootleg2go said:

As far as 1 Watt green lasers, none there

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I was under the impression that all HVD drives had 1W 532nm lasers... They need to be able to split the beam several times, then still have it powerful enough to penetrate through several layers of plastic... Every press release I've read has said they contain a 1W green laser and a <50mW red.

pseudolobster said:

This is fantastic news. I'm glad to hear someone lives close enough they may be able to get in on the auction.

I was under the impression that all HVD drives had 1W 532nm lasers... They need to be able to split the beam several times, then still have it powerful enough to penetrate through several layers of plastic... Every press release I've read has said they contain a 1W green laser and a <50mW red.

Click to expand...

The older systems used green, but the past couple of years they have mainly been focused (sorry about the pun) on using the 405nm blu-ray diode.
Remember, even though the beam may be split (not sure of the exact process as my buddy can't divulge it), it doesn't have to be very powerful, it's the concentration of power that's important and those data bits are very, very, very small, so it doesn't taken a powerful laser to do the job when the energy is focused on such a small spot.
If a 100-150mw blu-ray can write a DVD, it's not going to take any more than this for them to write their data when you consider the bits are many times smaller than those on a DVD writable disc.
Anyway, there might be some good stuff, but for sure there are a lot of high tech hard drive companies here in town (Seagate, WD, IBM and more) who will be at the auction too. Hopefully they don't put everything into large lots, I've seen that in the past; where you can't bid on just one item, they might be put into large lots of 100 desks, work benches or such. We'll just have to wait and see.

I REALLY want an optical table... but I think all the ones they have will be $10K humongous vibration protected deals... if they have any small drilled aluminum plates, like maybe a foot by a foot or so I would be interested. But I doubt it

will