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Technology Stocks : Ampex Corporation (AEXCA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Beth Ford who wrote (1106)	10/31/1997 5:25:00 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17679

Mary Beth, Welcome aboard! First, check out this instructive IBM Research website that provides road maps for the different components of a disk drive: almaden.ibm.com I usually check the technical seminars and conferences which AXC likes to use to announce any progress with KM. If you recall, AXC used the IDEMA symposium to announce that at a certain point on the areal density scale, using the keeper layer as an overlayer becomes impractical, BUT that they can still generate similar improvements in capacity and thermal stability by using the keeper layer as an underlayer. In the past, AXC has been very active at the Sta. Clara University, University of Minnesota, the University of California in San Diego, IDEMA, Intermag, TRMC, etc. Well, you get the idea. By the way, I never responded to your questions about the IBM 5.0 Gigabits/in2 MR heads announced late last year because I thought the info in the press release regarding 4-component alloy was too vague and I could never find additional details to make an opinion...until now. I had thought that IBM was using spin valves/GMR to achieve 5.0 Gbits/in2 but as disclosed at a recent seminar at the UCSD, IBM used conventional dual stripe MR heads to achieve this milestone. "5 Gigabits Per Square Inch Recording Demonstration with Conventional AMR Magnetoresistive Heads and Thin Film Disks" Magnetic recording at 5Gb/in2 and 10MB/s have been demonstrated using narrow track dual-element heads with conventional AMR sensors and low noise Co alloy thin film disks..... www-physics.ucsd.edu I don't think they used KM to achieve this milestone, but that doesn't mean that they can't or won't. You see, these are the road maps I'm using: 0 - 10 Gbits/in2 = longitudinal or horizontal recording 10 + Gbits/in2 = perpendicular or vertical recording AMR - Anistropic MR or conventional MR SPV/GMR - Spin Valves/Giant MR CMR - Colossal MR IBM leads the industry in areal density with the following AMR heads: 2.64 Gbits/in2 3.00 Gbits/in2 IBM usually likes to introduce their advanced MR heads in their notebook disk drives probably due to the limited volumes and the relatively high margins. If we are reading this piece of news correctly, then IBM can extend conventional MR or anistropic MR from 1.0 to 5.0 Gbits/in2 without having to transition to the next level of heads: spin valves/GMR. Spin Valves/GMR will be required to go from 5.0 to 10 Gbits/in2 at which point, the industry may have to transition to perpendicular or vertical recording to achieve higher densities. I frankly don't know when SPV/GMR ends and CMR begins because these are still in the research stages. Regards, Gus