Remote-centered compliance mechanism of micro-suspension for contact recording head

To achieve a higher magnetic memory density, contact recording will be a key technology. As a contact-sliding head is always subject to friction, the head has an unstable stick-slip motion in a nose-down attitude. In this paper, the authors present a new micro-suspension as an early trial for avoiding the stick-slip. The suspension is formed by a diagonally notched structure, with a remote centered compliance (RCC) mechanism. It is fabricated from a 125 μm thick sheet of polyinide using an ultraviolet laser; an inductive head with a 50×50 μm sliding pad is mounted on it. When sliding at 10 m/s under a normal force of 0.7 mN, the head always has an extremely high friction coefficient of 1.6. The suspension stabilizes the pitching motion of the head to within ±50 μrad in a nose-up attitude, inducing the acceptable modulation of read back signal to within ±5%. The RCC mechanism empirically realized a more stable motion than a non-RCC one, and will be a promising tool for contact recording.