News

posted on 06 June 2008 15:38

InPhase, the Tapestry holographic disk developer has laid off around 40 employees and delayed delivery of its drives, due in May, out to December. (Update to this story.)

The company was going to ship its 300GB drives in May but revised that to shipping 150GB evaluation units in May with 300GB drives shipping sometime in the last quarter. That fall back plan has now been changed to a drive shipment in December.

The InPhase CTO, Kevin Curtis, is reported as saying that: "we realized that we had more work to do before we could get to and release the 300GB product." The problem areas are shock and vibration absorption and laser reliability. The laser has been developed so that replacement or updated lasers can be retrofitted to shipped drives.

InPhase is working to fix these problems and the current plan is to resume product development in August, recalling some if not all of the laid-off workers, with a hopeful shipment of 300GB evaluation drives in December if things go well. This means that the problems are in supplied components which are holding up overall drive product development.

InPhase CEO and president Nelson Diaz said: "We were ready for product availability so we ramped up the company during the last four or five months assuming that we were ready for product availability, but now that's not going to happen."

Historically InPhase's development has been subject to many delays and there is no guarantee that these latest delays will be the last. The drives were first scheduled for release in 2006.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}