An overview of laser microprocessing in data storage industry

In data storage industry, head flying height has been continually reduced to increase the recording density. There are many engineering issues associated with this requirement. Laser microprocessing technologies have been widely used to address these issues to achieve high recording density and better reliability. For example, laser surface cleaning has been used to remove microparticles and microcontaminations from magnetic media and magnetic head sliders which has the potential to achieve better cleaning efficiency than those conventional cleaning methods. Laser surface processing can also be used to improve the tribology performance at the head-media interface. Lasers can be used to create microtextures at the landing zone of the magnetic disks to avoid microstiction and microfriction with minimum wearing issues. Meanwhile, the similar technique can be used to create microbumps on media surface as calibration reference for glider test. Microbumps can also be used as contamination-free laser tagging which provides better traceability and indentification of single-side disks. With the requirement of even higher recording density, laser processing has been developed to address engineering issues within nanometer order. Lasers, in combination of scanning probe microscopes (SPM), have demonstrated to be capable for nanoprocessing and nanolithography.