Hitachi achieves nanotechnology milestone for quadrupling terabyte hard drive
2007-10-16 03:00:00
TOKYO -- Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT) (TOKYO:6501) [profile] and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) announced that they have developed the world's smallest read-head technology for hard disk drives, which is expected to quadruple current storage capacity limits to four terabytes (TB) on a desktop hard drive and one TB on a notebook hard drive.
Researchers at Hitachi have successfully reduced existing recording heads by more than a factor of two to achieve new heads in the 30-50 nanometer (nm) range, which is up to 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair (approx. 70-100 microns). Called current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistive1 (CPP-GMR) heads, Hitachi's new technology is expected to be implemented in shipping products in 2009 and reach its full potential in 2011.
Hitachi will present these achievements at the 8th Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference (PMRC 2007) to be held October 15-17, 2007 at the Tokyo International Forum in Japan.
"Hitachi continues to invest in deep research for the advancement of hard disk drives as we believe there is no other technology capable of providing the hard drive's high-capacity, low-cost value for the foreseeable future," said Hiroaki Odawara, Research Director, Storage Technology Research Center, Central Research Laboratory, Hitachi, Ltd. "This is an achievement for consumers as much as it is for Hitachi. It allows Hitachi to fuel the growth of the 'Terabyte Era' of storage, which we started, and gives consumers virtually limitless ability for storing their digital content."
Hitachi believes CPP-GMR heads will enable hard disk drive (HDD) recording densities of 500 gigabits per square inch (Gb/sq. in.) to one terabit per square inch (Tb/sq. in.), a quadrupling of today's highest areal densities. Earlier this year, Hitachi GST delivered the industry's first one-terabyte hard drive at 148 Gb/; the company's highest areal density shipping in products today is in the 200 Gb/ range. These products use existing head technology, called TMR2 (tunnel-magnetoresistive) heads. The recording head and media are the two key technologies controlling the miniaturization evolution and the exponential capacity growth of the HDD.
Cutting Through the Noise -- The Strongest Signal-to-Noise Ratio
The continued advancements of HDDs requires the ability to squeeze more, and thus, smaller data bits onto the recording media, necessitating the continued miniaturization of the recording heads to read those bits. However, as the head becomes smaller, electrical resistance increases, which, in turn, also increases the noise output and compromises the head's ability to correctly read the data signal.
High signal output and low noise is what is desired in hard drive read operations; thus, researchers try to achieve a high signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio in developing effective read-head technology. Using TMR head technology, researchers predict that accurate read operations would not be conducted with confidence as recording densities begin to surpass 500 Gb/sq. in.
The CPP-GMR device, compared to the TMR device, exhibits less of an electrical resistance, resulting in lower electrical noise but also a smaller output signal. Therefore, issues such as producing a high output signal while maintaining a reduced noise to increase the S/N ratio needed to be resolved before the CPP-GMR technology became practical.
In response to this challenge, Hitachi, Ltd. and Hitachi GST have co-developed high-output technology and noise-reduction technology for the CPP-GMR head. A high electron-spin-scattering magnetic film material was used in the CPP-GMR layer to increase the signal output from the head, and new technology for damage-free fine patterning and noise suppression was developed. As a result, the signal-to-noise ratio, an important factor in determining the performance of a head, was drastically improved. For heads with track widths of 30nm to 50nm, industry-leading S/N ratios of 30 decibels (dB) and 40 dB, respectively, were recently achieved with the heads co-developed at Hitachi GST's San Jose Research Center and Hitachi, Ltd.'s Central Research Laboratory in Japan.
Recording heads with 50nm track widths are expected to debut in commercial products in 2009, and those with 30nm track widths will be implemented in products in 2011. Current TMR heads, shipping in products today, have track widths of 70nm.
The Incredible Shrinking Head
The discovery of the GMR effect occurred in 1988, and that body of work was recognized just last week with a Nobel Prize for physics. Nearly two decades after its discovery, the effects of GMR technology are felt more strongly than ever with Hitachi's demonstration of the CPP-GMR head today.
In 1997, nine years after the initial discovery of GMR technology, IBM implemented the industry's first GMR heads in the Deskstar 16GXP. GMR heads allowed the HDD industry to continue its capacity growth and enabled the fastest growth period in history, when capacity doubled every year in the early 2000s. Today, although areal density growth has slowed, advancements to recording head technology, along with other HDD innovations, are enabling HDD capacity to double every two years.
In the past 51 years of the HDD industry, recording head technology has seen monumental decreases in size as areal density and storage capacity achieved dizzying heights. The first HDD recording head, called the inductive head, debuted in 1956 in the RAMAC -- the very first hard drive -- with a track width of 1/20th of an inch, or 1.2 million nm. Today, the CPP-GMR head, with a track width of about one-millionth of an inch, or 30nm, represents a size reduction by a factor of 40,000 over the inductive head used in the RAMAC in 1956.
Notes
1 CPP-GMR: As an alternative to existing TMR heads, CPP-GMR head technology has a lower electrical resistance level, due to its reliance on metallic rather than tunneling conductance, and is thus suited to high-speed operation and scaling to small dimensions.
2 TMR head: Tunnel Magneto-Resistance head
A tunnel magneto-resistance device is composed of a three layer structure of an insulating film sandwiched between ferromagnetic films. The change in current resistance which occurs when the magnetization direction of the upper and lower ferromagnetic layers change (parallel or anti parallel) is known as the TMR effect, and ratio of electrical resistance between the two states is known as the magneto-resistance ratio.
Invisibility Made Easier A new method for creating metamaterials that bend light in unusual ways may bring practical applications closer.
By Kevin Bullis
In the past year, the media have been abuzz with talk of an exotic class of materials, called metamaterials, that could be used to make flat and distortion-free lenses, powerful microscopes, and even cloaking devices that make objects invisible. But versions of the materials suitable for practical applications have been difficult to make. Now researchers at Princeton University have demonstrated metamaterials that are both higher performing and much easier to manufacture, perhaps bringing these applications closer to reality.
"It's quite an important step," says Igor Smolyaninov, a research scientist at the University of Maryland who works with metamaterials. "It's much less expensive than anything else that people are doing."
Light passing from one ordinary material into another bends slightly--think of how a straight stick in water looks bent--but light passing into a metamaterial bends in the opposite direction. Metamaterials thus have what's called a negative index of refraction. A lens made from such a material wouldn't have to be curved. (It's the curvature of an ordinary lens that enables it to focus incoming light.) Metamaterials could also be used to route electromagnetic waves around an object, rendering it invisible. Already, researchers have demonstrated a cloaking device that makes objects invisible to microwaves, and others have created materials that negatively refract electromagnetic waves in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. But until now, metamaterials have had to be patterned with intricate shapes smaller than the wavelength of light they're meant to manipulate. Consequently, materials that work with light of microscopic wavelengths, such as infrared and visible light, have been difficult to make. Because of the way they produce negative refraction, existing metamaterials have also had a strong tendency to absorb light, making them impractical for use in optics.
The materials developed at Princeton retain the property of negative refraction, yet they're much easier to make. Rather than requiring intricate structures, such as the split rings used in the microwave cloaking device, the materials can be made simply by stacking up extremely thin layers of semiconductor material. What's more, that stacking can be done by the same tools now used to make semiconductor materials for lasers used in telecommunications, says Claire Gmachl, the Princeton researcher who led the work. The new materials consist of alternating layers of indium gallium arsenide and aluminum indium arsenide, and they're tuned to work in the infrared region of the spectrum.
Like other metamaterials, the new materials affect light differently than ordinary materials do because they are made of structures significantly smaller than the wavelength of the light passing through them. In this case, however, it is the layers of semiconductors themselves that are thinner than the wavelength of light. Consequently, a wave passing through the material encounters multiple layers at once, responding to them as if they were a single material with properties quite unlike those of either semiconductor in isolation.
US scientists have unveiled a detector thousands of times smaller than the diameter of a human hair that can translate radio waves into sound.
According to a University of California team, the study marks the first time that a nano-sized detector has been demonstrated in a working radio system.
Made of carbon nanotubes a few atoms across, it is almost 1,000 times smaller than current radio technology.
Peter Burke and Chris Rutherglen incorporated the microscopic detector into a complete radio system.
Nanowire manipulation could lead to hand-held supercomputers
2007-10-23 17:41:00
Researchers have been working on nanowires and microchips so tiny that they could be used to build supercomputers that could fit in the palm of your hand. Hopefully, the nanowires will eventually lead to small, powerful gadget such as hand-held PCs, mobile phones as powerful as laptops, and medical advances.
The group of engineers, with members from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland [profile], the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and the University of Rome in Italy, will have their results published in an upcoming issue of Science.
The researchers studied the behavioral properties of nanowires--which are more than 1,000 times thinner than a human hair--and investigated how the wires react and respond to exterior forces compared with conventional wires.
"What we found is when we made these wires smaller and smaller they started to behave in a very funny way," researcher Michael Zaiser told the BBC News.
nanotechnology.com articles ~~ 10-27-2007 thru 11-08-2007 MOST RECENT NEWS
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Nanotubes to knit bulletproof armour Carbon nanotubes are being probed to see if they are the world's most bulletproof materials.
2007-11-06 01:05:00
Australian researchers Professor Liangchi Zhang and Dr Kausala Mylvaganam from the University of Sydney [profile] report on the bullet-bouncing ability of carbon nanotubes in the current issue of the journal Nanotechnology.
"The nanotube absorbs energy from the bullet and the bullet speed reduces," says Zhang, an engineer with the university's Centre for Advanced Materials Technology.
"Then the nanotube tries to recover elastically, and transfer back the energy to the bullet."
Most bulletproof materials are made of ultra high-strength polymers like Kevlar, Twaron or Dyneema fibres.
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