Anti-thermal asperity head: design and performance analysis

Abstract As technology moves to 40–100 Gb/in 2 areal densities, the head-disk spacing will be reduced to a level of 5–10 nm. As a result, the head-disk contact/impact and impact-induced degradation of readback signal are becoming serious concerns. A read/write head structure design is described and discussed in this work, aiming to support high read/write resolution, eliminate the concern on read–write alignment, and reduce the effect of such thermal asperity significantly.