International Business Machines Corporation

Ralph D Silkensen

Gerald Steving

Neil L Robinson

Bradford Clyde Schwartz

Davis S Fields, Jr

Joseph E Wallace

Gerald A Daughenbaugh

Wayne McCormick

George F Pennell

Roger D Bassett

Rhodes W Polleys

A batch fabricated multi-element head is made from interlocking ferrite parts to form a low contoured surface for interfacing with a magnetic medium, such as a flexible disk. On another surface, a multi-turn conductive coil is formed by thin film process and cooperates with a flux path bar to define the magnetic flux field.

Multi-element head assembly

A flux extender or guide for a magnetic read head having a magnetoresistive read element. The element is mounted on a substrate, contained, for example, in a hand-held wand structure. The element is spaced from the contact portion of the wand, to permit a small amount of wear of the head to take place, before the read element comes into contact with the record media. In order to increase the spacing between the magnetoresistive element and the contact portion of the wand, the flux guide or extender is utilized. The flux guide or extender is a wedge-shaped piece of magnetizable material. At the end of the flux guide closest to the read element, the guide is approximately as wide as the element and tapers down to approximately three quarters of its top width at the lower end of the guide. The guide is of uniform thickness and thicker than the read element. The cross-sectional area is selected to be from two to three times the cross-sectional area of the read element. The flux guide is preferably fabricated from a magnetic material which is non-corrosive or less corrosive than the read element and having a higher value of flux density than the element. The width of the guide at the lower end is less than the width of the element, which permits higher density of magnetized bits per inch to be decoded. Also, the length of the guide is less than the minimum distance between flux transitions for good resolution.

Flux extender or guide for magnetic read head having a magnetoresistive

An MR head is disclosed in which the MR element is deposited onto a sapphire substrate with a particular crystallographic orientation and a sapphire closure piece also having a particular crystallographic orientation is used. The substrate has the MR element deposited onto either the {0001} or the {1120} plane with the {1100} plane being oriented as the wear surface. The closure piece has either the {1120} or the {0001} plane facing the MR material and the {1100} plane oriented as the wear surface.

Wear resistant magnetorestrictive head

An insulating film substantially free from surface irregularities is RF bias sputtered onto a smooth polycrystalline or micro-roughened surface. Controlled sputtering is performed first at a low reemission coefficient and then, after a substantially continuous layer of insulative amorphous film is deposited over the substrate, increasing the reemission coefficient to a second higher level. A low reemission coefficient is about 0.25 and a high coefficient is about 0.7.

RF bias sputtering method for producing insulating films free of surface

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Tucson, AZ, United States of America

Ralph D Silkensen