Biased Micromechanical Cantilever Arrays as Optical Image Memory

We show that an array of optically actuated biased cantilevers can work as an optical data storage, able to encode data stored as arrays of optical pixels (images). Each of these optical pixels can, in addition, have a predetermined pixel depth, expressed as a certain number of gray levels. This new optical memory is able to work at a data rate of approximately 7 GB /s for an image with 128 * 128 pixels.