Novel Polymer Templated Lithography Technique for Fabrication of Ni Nanodots for Bit Patterned Media Applications

Abstract

Magnetic disk drive technology has successfully reduced the size of multi-grain bits to newline~30 nm, and there are intensive efforts to shrink the bit size further. The new generation newlinehard disk drives shipped by Seagate Technologies around August 2009 boasts of newlinerecording densities of around 500 GB/inch2 using a combination of vertical recording, newlinewrite head lithography, use of magnetoresistance sensors and better recording media. newlineThough the research and development in this field is progressing at a fast pace the areal newlinedensities achievable using conventional scaling is limited to the so-called trilemma newlineproblem of satisfying the concurrent requirements of thermal stability, writability, and newlineachieving a high signal to noise ratio. newlineThough technologies such as heat assisted recording and phase change memory are being newlineexplored as future data storage technologies, there has also been great interest in bit newlinepatterned media (BPM), where arrays of isolated magnetic nanodots act as individual bits newlinewhich can be read and written by controlling their magnetization. One of the obvious newlineadvantages of BPM technique is that it would allow us to write one bit on a single grain newlineas compared to the standard procedure of averaging a single bit over 25 30 grains (to newlineprevent data loss due to thermal fluctuations and the demagnetizing field of the adjacent newlinegrains) newline