Experimental demonstration of gray-scale sparse modulation codes in volume holographic storage.

We discuss experimental results of a versatile nonbinary modulation and channel code appropriatefor two-dimentional page-oriented holographic memories. An enumerative permutation code is used to provide a modulation code that permits a simple maximum-likelihood detection scheme. Experimental results from the IBM Demon testbed are used to characterize the performance and feasibility of the proposed modulation and channel codes. A reverse coding technique is introduced to combat the effects of error propagation on the modulation-code performance. We find experimentally that level-3 pixels achieve the beet practical result, offering an 11-35% improvement in capacity and a 12% increase in readout rate as compared with local binary thresholding techniques.