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Technology Stocks : Read-Rite
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To: Mark Oliver who wrote (4218)10/29/1998 6:59:00 PM
From: Stitch  Read Replies (1) of 5058
 
Mark,

<<Do you find that ESD is becoming more manageable? >>

Not at all. If anything it becomes more challenging as the density curve climbs and especially as the industry shifts to GMR which are even more susceptible to ESD damage. This will likely be the case for a while. For example: contamination in disk drives is no longer just a case of particulates interfering with the head-t-disk interface causing a crash. Now drive manufacturers have to worry about a contaminate they are calling ionic. These are ultra small (ions) charged particles that can build up a charge sufficient to discharge and create so-called thermal errors. One contact I spoke to recently suggested that larger particles cannot interfere with the head-disk interface these days as flying heights were so small they simply get pushed out of the way but that charged ions (say, from outgassing from the base plate which is typically a casted part) can cause problems. This latter comment sounds a bit glib but is evidentiary of just how small the flying heights have become. The industry is down to a nominal 3 microinches. Thats 3/1,000,000 of an inch.

To expand further on the geometry in a disk drive the lubricant used on a platter in the drive must be controlled within a few angstroms with the nominal thickness somewhere around 25 angstroms as I recall. An angstrom is 1/10 of a nanometer.

Best,
Stitch
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