Heat-assisted Magnetic Recording
Creators: name: University Of California Office Of The President
Publisher: name: University of California Office of the President
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/00dmfq477
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: This collaborative UC-Riverside (UCR)/Western Digital Corporation (WDC) study is aimed to exploit the unique expertise of the Principal Investigator Sakhrat Khizroev, Professor, Electrical Engineering, UCR, in focused ion beam (FIB) rapid prototyping of nanoscale devices to help the industry giant to engineer high-throughput near-field optical transducers (NFTs). The development of such transducers is a key open question in the emerging field of Heat-assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) – a promising data storage technology for information densities beyond 1 terabit-per-square-inch. The role of the co-investigator Rabee Ikkawi, Senior Principal Engineer, WDC, will be to help tailor (through industry-standard testing) the transducers fabricated via FIB at UCR to specifications necessary for integrating them into the company’s future HAMR drives. Dr. Roman Chomko, a Research Faculty at the Department of Electrical Engineering, and John Bulter, PhD Graduate Student in the Khizroev group, will be the other two co-investigators involved in this project. Their roles will be to simulate NFTs and work with FIB systems, respectively. The significance of the joint team’s capability to manufacture and conduct industry-standard tests on many competing NFT designs in a relatively short period of time is hard to overestimate especially today when the industry is going through such an unprecedented phase in its history. For the first time, it is facing a fundamental limit (superparamagnetism) to further increasing the information density through scaling. The main open question is to find an adequate NFT design to enable HAMR for such high areal densites. Another important challenge is associated with the complexity and volume of fabrication and testing of such small (nanoscale) optical transducers. There are quite a few NFT aperture designs which need to be analyzed to understand the true capability and limitations of HAMR technology. The FIB-based rapid prototyping and industry-standard testing capability of the UCR/WDC team will allow a record fast comparative study of hundreds of NFT designs and therefore will address the above challenge. By using its FIB-rapid prototyping strength to advance the technology of HAMR, this university-industry initiative has potential to directly or indirectly address the $300-bln market. Furthermore, the market for storage devices is projected to further grow at healthy rates especially with many rapidly emerging hand-held and many other new mobile applications. Finally, as innovative technologies are developed to solve existing problems, new often unforeseen applications may emerge that take advantage of the new technology. This research is intended to strengthen the technology position of WDC, the partner company, on the national and international scales. Therefore, the success of this project will directly impact the strategic position of the state of California in the high technology arena.