17th ASME Conference on Information Storage and Processing Systems at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, USA

This Special Issue is a collection of papers that were presented at the 17th ASME Conference on Information Storage and Processing Systems (ISPS) at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, USA on June 18 and 19, 2007. To archive the papers presented at this 17th ISPS conference, all authors of papers submitted to the conference were encouraged to submit a full paper to this Special Issue in Microsystems Technologies. The papers that appear in this Special Issue have been subjected to a rigorous peer-review process in which many contributions had to be revised substantially before they could be published in this Special Issue. Obviously, this process has created a special selection of the many topics presented at the 17th ISPS conference, making it a great privilege to host the 17th ISPS conference and serve as guest editors for this Special Issue. The ISPS division of the ASME is the main division working on storage systems that include disk drives, tape drives, and optical drives. The ISPS division has held their annual conference at Santa Clara University in sunny California in June of each year and provides an environment in which researchers of both academic and industrial backgrounds share their latest developments on data storage systems. Since 2003, tri-annually, the ISPS division joins forces with the IIP (Information, Intelligent, and Precision Machines) division of the JSME (Japanese Society of Mechanical Engineers) to organize a joint conference called MIPE (Micromechatronics for Information and Precision Equipment). The annual conference of the ISPS division of the ASME is a very unique conference that brings together academia and industry in joint sessions on topics that relate to the interdisciplinary nature of the research in data storage and processing systems. To achieve the goal of merging academic and industrial research topics, the ISPS conference is held at Santa Clara in the Silicon Valley, allowing local industrial participants to attend and contribute to the conference with little travel time. With easy international access to the Bay area, the conference also enjoys many international visitors. The ISPS conference promotes industry and academic interaction by an organization that features many interdisciplinary technical sessions with a specific application focus. At the 17th ISPS conference eight different technical sessions were organized, each with dedicated session chairs to solicit papers and contributions from both academic and industrial institutions. The technical sessions at the 17th ISPS conference included Actuators and Suspensions with applications in actuator and (dual-stage) suspension design, dynamics and analysis; Servo Control and Servo Technology: bringing together topics on dynamics, vibrations, servo design, servo writing, tracking and seeking; Tribology and Head/ Media Interface: with contributions on friction, wear, lubrication, corrosion, contamination, thin films, contact mechanics and heat transfer. Spindle Motor and Acoustics: with contemporary issues on design, vibrations, acoustics and tribology related aspects of spindle motors; Flexible Media Mechanics and Tape Storage: illustrating the issues R. A. de Callafon (&) Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Jacobs School of Engineering, UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0411, USA e-mail: callafon@ucsd.edu