Field assisted magnetic contact printing with soft magnetic patterned thin films

Abstract The increase in storage density for both hard discs and floppy media makes the formatting operations very long and expensive. For writing the format globally on a magnetic medium in a very short time, a method of magnetic contact printing is proposed. For this purpose a master disc, made of pure iron dots of 18×18 μm2, is put in contact with a medium the coercive force of which is close to 1600 Oe. An external bias field lower than 2300 Oe is applied in the same time. Magnetic duplication occurs with bias fields ranging from 500 to 2300 Oe but the best results are obtained with bias fields close to 1000 Oe. It is also demonstrated that this method can be successfully used to duplicate bits on hard discs or to write 5×2 μm2 bits on floppy media.