Yinfeng Ding

HAMR Areal Density Demonstration of 1+ Tbpsi on Spinstand

Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is being developed as the next-generation magnetic recording technology. Critical aspects of this technology, such as plasmonic near-field transducer (NFT) and high anisotropy granular FePt media, have been demonstrated and reported. However, progress with areal density was limited until recently. In this paper, we report a basic technology demonstration (BTD) of HAMR, at 1.007 Tbpsi with a linear density of 1975 kBPI and track density of 510 kTPI, resulting from advances in magnetic recording heads with NFT and FePtX media. This demonstration not only shows significant areal density improvement over previously reported HAMR demos, more significantly, it shows HAMR recording at a much higher linear density compared to previous reports. It is an important milestone for the development of such a new technology. Many challenges still remain to bring this technology to market, such as system reliability and further advancement of areal density.

Substrate Bias Effects on Magnetic and Structural Properties of

In this paper, a method to improve the magnetic and structural properties of heat-assisted magnetic recording media by applying partial substrate bias during the deposition of FePt-based recording layer is demonstrated. Although the application of a substrate bias for the entire FePt layer deposition deteriorated the media properties, improvements were noted when a substrate bias is selectively applied for the deposition of top portion of the FePt layer. Our experiments suggest that the compressive stress due to the ion peening in the biased deposition degrades the texture and magnetic properties of the FePt media, primarily during the initial phase of FePt film growth. On the other hand, the media fabricated by applying an optimum substrate bias for the deposition of top portion of the FePt layer showed improvements in the micro-structural and magnetic properties.

{L1}_{0}

Discrete track media (DTM) has been widely studied recently as a solution to achieve high track density for hard disk drives. In DTM, nano-patterning process is used to isolate magnetic tracks. During the fabrication process, magnetic damage occurs in the resist striping process using O2 plasma. The on-track SNR of DTM degrades by ~ 2-3 dB. We used Ar IBE cleaning process to remove the oxide layer. The removal process induces unexpected magnetic property change. Nevertheless, this process can still improve the SNR significantly. However, the cleaning step also causes track corner rounding, and results in a faster SNR roll-off at high linear densities. Several methods for further improving DTM performance are discussed in this paper, including using a protective cap layer and media magnetic design reoptimization.