Frank E. Stageberg

Magnetic recording demonstration over 100 Gbit/In/sup 2/

Areal density growth has enabled hard disk drives to continually fulfill the demands from new enterprise, desktop, and consumer applications. The demonstration of 100 Gb/in/sup 2/ is another milestone that was achieved recently and is described in this paper. The recording demonstration employed fully integrated magnetic recording heads and thermally stable multilayer antiferromagnetically coupled (AFC) media through a commercially available channel chip. At a track density of 149 ktpi and linear density of 680 kbpi, the achieved off-track capability with 5% track squeeze was 10% of the track pitch, while maintaining a raw bit-error rate (BER) of 10/sup -4/ or better. This yielded an areal density of 101 Gb/in/sup 2/ with measured on-track raw BER of 5/spl times/10/sup -5/.

Influence of rf magnetron sputtering conditions on the magnetic, crystalline, and electrical properties of thin nickel films

Thin nickel films with thicknesses ranging from 30 to 150 nm were deposited via radio frequency (rf) magnetron sputtering. The influence of argon pressure, film thickness, rf input power, and deposition rate on the magnetic, crystalline, and electrical properties of the films was evaluated. Depending on deposition conditions, film coercivity could be varied from 2 to 290 Oe while saturation magnetization could be varied from 280 to 500 emu/cm3. Higher argon pressures produced lower coercivity films. The films exhibited a dominant fcc(111) orientation. Lower argon pressures and higher rf input powers increased nickel grain sizes. Classical models based on domain wall energy considerations and film microstructure are used to intrepret the observed experimental results.