Challenges and implementation approaches of shingled heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) for 10 Tb/In2 data storage

Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) has been considered to be the most promising candidate for next generation magnetic recording technology beyond 1.5 Tb/in² and it may extend the recording density to about 5 Tb/in². However, it may face challenges to further increase the areal density to 10 Tb/in² and beyond due to the difficulties to further reduce the thermal spot size of <; 50 nm because of difficulties in fabricating even smaller near field transducer (NFT) with enough efficiency. In this paper, we propose to use wide NFT to write narrower HAMR tracks by writing tracks sequentially overlapping with previous tracks (i.e., shingling) so as to increase HAMR track density and areal density in total. The improvement in writing profile curvature/ field gradient at write corner allows further track density increase while keeping the linear density from being reduced significantly. It is demonstrated by experimental and simulation results that the total areal density is able to be increased with significantly increased track density for improved shingled HAMR without too much sacrifice of linear density. The advantages of the proposed shingled HAMR include writing narrow track width with larger NFT/ thermal spot size and ease of NFT fabrication for better cost/ yield control.