State-of-the-Art Magnetic Hard Disk Drives

would expect the corresponding values in of grains per bit constant, and reducing the
today’s drives to be 4.3 nm and 2.9 nm, re- media’s magnetic thickness Mrt (where Mr
spectively. These values are surprisingly is the remanent magnetization and t is the
close to the current 14–20-nm media thick- thickness) to keep self-demagnetizing fields
nesses and 10-nm fly height, and highlight manageable. The original disk recording
two important factors of the current disk medium consisted of iron oxide particles
drives. First, many of the critical dimensions in an organic binder that was spun onto
in modern disk drives are now on the the disk. This technology was in use until
nanometer scale. While the original disk the 1980s, when the inability to scale par-
drives used the bulk properties of materials, ticle size, and particle size distributions,
the physics of state-of-the-art drives is in- was in part responsible for the introduc-
creasingly dominated by thin-film and in- tion of sputtered thin-film CoCr alloy Figure 2. Schematic representation of
terface effects and can be viewed as media. For these granular CoCr films, the an antiferromagnetically coupled
commercial implementation of nanotech- Cr diffuses toward the grain boundaries medium. The medium has upper and
nology. Second, the values of certain di- during growth, resulting in a magnetic core lower media layers that are separated
mensions (e.g., media thickness and fly of the grain with nonmagnetic or weakly by a thin Ru layer whose thickness is
height), while small, are not scaling as fast magnetic grain boundaries. These films tuned to couple the layers
as one expects. In fact, the thickness of the have evolved to the current media using antiferromagnetically.
media has essentially not changed for the CoPtCrB alloys. Alloy developments,
last five years, because thermal activation along with considerable improvements in lowing the magnetic thickness to be scaled
of nanoscale magnetic particles, known as underlayers, allowed the grain size and while maintaining thermal stability.9
superparamagnetism, precludes continued media thickness to scale appropriately to Although AFC media were introduced
scaling, as will be discussed in the next grain diameters D on the order of 8 nm. into products in 2001, a detailed under-
section. This phenomenon is the main However, as was pointed out in 1997 by standing of them has only recently
impetus for the transition to PMR, as out- Charap et al.,1 scaling of the media is emerged. In current designs, the thicker
lined in the article by Richter and Hark- limited by thermal instabilities when the upper layer is a magnetically hard, low-
ness in this issue. grain volume V decreases to the point noise recording medium. In contrast, the
The evolution of the basic technologies where the magnetic energy per particle thinner lower layer has a low coercivity
for the write element, the read element, KUV (where KU is the magnetic anisotropy and relatively high intergranular ferro-
and the storage medium follows a com- energy density) becomes comparable with magnetic exchange and would be super-
mon pathway. The early drives were thermal energies. The minimum energy paramagnetic on its own.10 During the
bulk-processed: the magnetic medium needed to maintain stability for
10 years write process, the recording head defines
was spin-coated onto disks and the coils is KUV
55 kBT, where kB is the Boltzmann transitions in the upper layer first while
of the heads were individually hand- constant and T is absolute temperature. the head field saturates the lower layer.
wound. As dimensions decreased, there Reductions in V can be countered by in- The transition in the lower layer is only
was a transition to thin-film deposition in creasing KU. However, KU increases are formed after the write head has passed,
the 1970s that evolved into the complex limited by available write fields needed when the lower layer relaxes into its equi-
thin-film heterostructures in the 1990s that to overcome the media’s coercive field, librium configuration. The time scale for
persist today. For example, the first write
KU/MS, where MS is the saturation mag- this process, which can be orders of mag-
heads were laminated NiFe cores hand- netization of the media. The combination nitude longer than the nanosecond write
wound with enamel-coated wires, while of SNR requirements, write-field limita- times, and the resulting magnetic patterns
modern heads are electroplated CoFeNi tions, and thermal activation of small of the lower layer depend on the strength
yokes and Cu conductors fabricated with particles is commonly referred to as the of the coupling to the upper layer and the
wafer-level processing. The technologies superparamagnetic limit.1,2 material parameters of the lower layer
for storing information—the disk—and Considerable effort has focused on lay- (e.g., KU, KUV, thickness, intergranular ex-
for reading the information—the read- ered heterostructures that can extend the change, etc.). For certain lower-layer com-
back head—have changed even more limits of LMR media.3–7 One such example positions and thicknesses, the average
dramatically. is antiferromagnetically coupled (AFC) magnetization of the lower layer can ori-
media.3,4 A schematic of the AFC recording ent orthogonal to the upper layer for high
Longitudinal Media media structure in its simplest form is bit densities.11
In LMR media, the signal-to-noise ratio shown in Figure 2. The recording medium Given the different process involved in
(SNR) needed for high-density recording is made up of two ferromagnetic layers forming the transitions in the two layers,
is determined by statistically averaging (upper and lower layers with Mrt values understanding the resulting read-back
the contributions from a large number of of MrtU and MrtL, respectively) separated signal and noise is nontrivial. In an AFC
weakly interacting magnetic grains per bit. by a ruthenium layer whose thickness is medium, the response can be viewed as a
The granular system limits the magnetic tuned to couple the layers antiferromag- superposition of the signals from the upper
correlations and allows information to be netically via an indirect exchange medi- and lower layers, SU and SL , respectively.
written on a finer scale than is possible in ated by the nonmagnetic ruthenium, a In most cases, the lower-layer signal is op-
a homogeneous magnetic film. As illus- so-called “RKKY interaction.”8 For such a posite to the upper-layer signal such that
trated in Figure 1, the transitions generally structure, the effective Mrt of the compos- the composite signal S is given by
follow the grain boundaries, and thus the ite structure is given by the difference
storage density of the data is ultimately between the Mrt values of the two layers, S
SU – SL. (1)
limited by the grain size. Scaling of mag- Mrt
MrtU – MrtL. The effective energy
netic media involves reducing the grain barrier KUVeff for the composite is deter- That is, the lower-layer signal subtracts
diameter in an attempt to keep the number mined primarily by the upper layer, al- from the upper layer signal. Similarly,

380 MRS BULLETIN • VOLUME 31 • MAY 2006