Motomichi Shibano

High optical efficiency integrated head for use in magneto-optical disk drive

We explain the integrated magneto-optical (MO) head module that contains diffractive optical elements (DOE) and a beam-splitter (BS) with cylindrical surfaces. The optical system for servo signal detection is miniaturized by developing a multi-functional DOE. This system yields precise servo signals, and can eliminate the tracking error signal (TES) and focusing error signal (FES) independently. Power detection system is composed by using a multilevel DOE for high-speed automatic power control (APC). We suppress the distribution of the incidence angle on the BS surface, when divergent light is incident on the BS. It enables our integrated head to increase the coupling efficiency of a collimator without the deterioration of optical characteristics. When we test the head in a MO disk drive, the byte error rate (BER) of 10-6 is achieved. We confirm that this drive has the same commercial level performance for a 1.3 GB MO disk with magnetic super-resolution (MSR) technology.