Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
724814 Journal of Electrostatics 2006 8 Pages PDF
Abstract

GMR (giant magnetoresistive) heads used for HDD (hard disk drives) are very sensitive to ESD (electrostatic discharge). Some kinds of ESD damages will cause soft magnetic degradations of head performance with a progressive nature. We report examples of head degradations by ESD damages as well as other damages due to head scratches, electro-migration effects and corrosion of GMR stack. It is usually very difficult to distinguish these phenomena explicitly by QST (quasistatic tester) and spinstand measurement test. We show that head scratches can cause damages similar to damages caused by ESD and that re-magnetization has certain potential to correct the damaged magnetic structure caused by such scratches.

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Physical Sciences and Engineering Engineering Electrical and Electronic Engineering
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