Greater than 14 Gb/in2 spin valve heads

We have designed and fabricated dual spin valve heads with synthetically pinned layers. They have excellent sensitivity. The read-back waveform has a small asymmetry and that is also insensitive to the bias current. The read gap length is of 0.14 mu m and the write gap length is of 0.2 mu m. The read heads have a nominal magnetic trackwidth of 0.5 mu m and a nominal write magnetic trackwidth of 0.8 mu m. The write heads were conventional inductive heads with their pole geometry defined by focused ion beam (FIB) technology. The dual spin valve heads have achieved an areal read/write density as high as 14.5 Gb/in(2) at a data transfer rate of 23 similar to 24 MB/sec The sensitivity of the readers is as high as 3.6 mVp-p/mu m. The bit aspect ratio is as high as 14.