Emulating media defect corrosion

This paper reports studies that were designed to understand how defects grow under stressful environment, and how their propagation is affected by media metallurgies and the alloy pairing. We further discuss the impact of the overcoat and lubricant type in the corrosion growth. One significant aspect of media defects is that their origin is diverse. They can be generated through pre-sputter substrate contamination, sputter process problems, as well as post sputter issues such as scratching. To understand how these different types of defects corrode, focused ion beam (FIB) technology was employed to create well-defined defects of various depths, tuned to terminate at various metallurgies of interest. The defects were characterized using AFM before and after environmental stressing, and followed by SEM/EDX analysis when needed.