Design and Modeling of Femto Air Bearing Slider

Abstract

This paper presents the studies of the performance of an improved femto air bearing slider which is optimized based on the past studies and effort. The flying characteristics performance of this novel femto slider is relatively stable over different radii. This optimized slider achieved a flying height of 3 nm, with variation of about 0.2 nm. The variations for pitch and roll values are 6 µrad and 0.9 µrad respectively. In the studies for the effect of side rail on flying characteristics, it was found that there exists transition of pitch value when the side rail is located very close to the leading edge. The modulation of flying height reduces greatly when the areas of double shallow steps increase. The roll variation reduces when the flat double shallow steps profile is modified into a “V-Shape” profile

Plasma characteristics and ion etching performance in hard disk drive slider fabrication processes

“…The detected etching rate in condition (4) thus was much less than in the condition (3). The effect of beam voltage to the etching rate was considered by the comparison of the conditions (3) and (5). The graphs showed clearly if the beam voltage increased, the etching rates rose as well.…”

“…Since the HDD slider fabrication influences a quality and reliability of HDDs, it is very important to develop the fabrication processes as well. An ion beam etching (IBE) process is commonly chosen to fabricate a slider's pattern underneath the slider in form of an air bearing surface (ABS) making the slider floats or slides at a few nanometers over the surface of a HDD's platter [4][5][6].…”