An Efficient Thermal Actuator Design for the Thermal Flying Height Control

The increasing demanding for higher capacity storage devices continues to push the recoding densities of hard disk drivers to their limit. This has led to a significant decrease in the slider-disk spacing to less than 10 nm. The active-head slider technology has recently been implemented in magnetic recording disk. The thermal flying height control (TFC) sliders are to use a small resistance heater incorporated near the read/write element. By applying a current to the heater, it can change the contour of slider due to the Joule heat induced thermal deformation, thereby controlling the flying height of the slider. Improving the power efficiency and obtaining a large reduction of the flying height are important in the application of thermal flying height control slider.