Date/Time
Date(s) - 23/11/2011
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Title: Heat Assisted Magnetisation Reversal (HAMR): Sustaining Mooreâ??s Law for Magnetic Recording Media

Speaker: Dr. John Whitehead – Memorial University

Institute: Memorial University – Department of Physics & Physical Oceanography

Location: ABB 102

Description:

Mooreâ??s Law refers to the doubling of the number of transistors can be placed on an inexpensive integrated circuit every two years. The capacity of inexpensive magnetic storage media also has increased exponentially over the last the two decades. This remarkable growth in storage capacity has been the result of a combination of clever engineering and several major scientific advances in the materials and designs used in construction of the read/write heads and magnetic recording media. However, current technologies are unlikely to be able to sustain the decreasing bit size required to maintain this exponential growth for more than a few years into the future. In this talk I will describe some of the constraints imposed by current magnetic media on the continued reduction in bit size, and some recent simulation studies carried out by our group, in collaboration with researchers at Western Digital, to explore one potential solution, Heat Assisted Magnetisation Reversal (HAMR).