Thin film floppy disk head

Thin film head technology has traditionally been used in rigid disk drives. Since floppy disk drives are being pushed towards higher performance and the cost of thin film fabrication is decreasing, the use of thin film heads in high performance floppy disk drives is a logical choice. This paper reviews the characteristics of the thin film floppy disk head. Both straddle and tunnel erase can be done using thin film technology. The thin film core which contains the deposited transducer is bonded into a standard floppy head button. The Cyber 5001 series presents a 96 TPI thin film floppy disk head with straddle erase. The Cyber 5002 is a 135 TPI floppy disk head with tunnel erase for the ANSI standard 135 TPI floppy disk cartridge drive. Straddle erase is accomplished using the same coil layers as those of the read-write head. Tunnel erase can be done by depositing the transducers on either side of a ferrite substrate. The independent tunnel erase head on the opposite side allows a direct current to be applied to a separate coil. This configuration achieves wide-write, narrow-erase data tracks.