The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Sep. 12, 2000
Filed:
Oct. 31, 1997
Axel Alegre de la Soujeole, Scotts Valley, CA (US);
STMicroelectronics, Inc., Carrollton, TX (US);
Abstract
A multi-head, disc drive, of a data storage system having a preamplifier that is split into a mother chip and set of daughter chips, each daughter chip corresponding to a head in the disc drive. The daughter chips contain very little circuitry, typically just a write driver, the front end of a read amplifier, a write fault detector, and a bias control circuit. Because the daughter chip contains little circuitry, it can be made much smaller and lighter than a conventional preamplifier, allowing the daughter chip to be placed on the suspension, close to the head. This allows the signal sent to and received from the head associated with a daughter chip to be strong enough not to be corrupted during transmission to the circuitry in the rest of the preamplifier. It also increases the bandwidth and reduces the power consumption of the preamplifier. The mother chip contains the remaining circuitry needed in the preamplifier and can be placed farther away, on a portion of the HSA that can support a larger chip.