In the Personal Computing (PC) and Consumer Electronics (CE) markets, demand for high capacity products is continuing to escalate. To address today’s needs, the HDD industry has implemented perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology in order to increase the storage capacity of hard disk drives. The merging of optical thermal assist and perpendicular recording is of high interest to the hard disk drive (HDD) industry, as it enables manufacturers to reach capacities around ten times greater than what is now possible.
As research and development for Terabit recording continues, thermal assisted magnetic recording is considered to be one of the crucial technologies. For this method to work, it is essential to have a very small optical spot with high optical transmission efficiency on the recording media.
Successful implementation of thermal assisted recording technology also requires the following criteria:
- Optical elements must be incorporated into the hard disk drive magnetic head manufacturing process.
- Output beam size needs to be focused to an extremely small size to achieve the very high density recording at 1 Terabit per square inch (1 Tbit/in2).
- High optical transmission efficiency is required to heat the recording spot to allow easier recording on high coercivity magnetic media.
In order to attain terabit class recording, a combination of leading-edge technologies are required, and Fujitsu remains at the forefront with such accomplishments. During 2005-06, several new breakthroughs were announced in Japan, including: advancements in patterned media technology (June '05); a new lubricant that allows for lower flying height (April '06); and improvements in head material development (August '06). With this latest achievement in thermal assisted magnetic recording, Fujitsu continues to demonstrate its leadership in technological innovations designed to improve recording density.