Bond Pad Sharing for Magnetic Recording Head Sensors
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Solution Overview
Problem
Magnetic recording heads configured for interlaced magnetic recording face challenges in minimizing the number of bond pads required for additional components, as adding more bond pads increases costs and complexity, and sharing bond pads between components can lead to bias contention and degraded performance.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a bond pad sharing strategy between multiple contact sensors for magnetic recording heads, where a single pair of bond pads is used to connect multiple contact sensors, allowing them to sense head-disk contact and spacing changes at multiple close points without increasing the number of bond pads.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If multiple bond pads are used to connect multiple contact sensors to multiple close points, then sensing capability at each close point is improved, but the number of bond pads increases leading to increased cost and complexity
Solution Approach 1:
Multiple contact sensors are electrically connected in parallel between a single pair of bond pads, merging their electrical paths. This allows multiple sensors at different close points to share the same bond pad connection, reducing the total number of bond pads required while maintaining individual sensing capability at each close point
Solution Approach 2:
A single pair of bond pads is designed to serve multiple contact sensors simultaneously, making the bond pads universal connections that support multiple sensing functions. This multi-functional approach allows the same bond pad infrastructure to enable sensing at multiple close points without requiring dedicated bond pads for each sensor
2Device complexity
If bond pads are shared between multiple contact sensors, then the number of bond pads is reduced, but bias contention may occur degrading sensing performance
Solution Approach 1:
The shared bond pad connection is segmented into separate parallel electrical paths for each contact sensor. Each sensor maintains its own dedicated sensing path between the shared bond pads, preventing electrical interference and bias contention while still utilizing the same bond pad infrastructure
Solution Approach 2:
The parallel electrical connection structure acts as an intermediary that allows multiple contact sensors to access the shared bond pads without direct electrical conflict. This intermediary connection topology enables simultaneous operation of multiple sensors on the same bond pad pair without degrading individual sensing performance
Applied Scientific Principles
This section explains which scientific principles are used to turn an abstract innovation direction into a practical engineering solution.
Function Achieved in This Case
This approach reduces the number of bond pads needed, minimizing real estate requirements and avoiding bias contention, while maintaining effective sensing capabilities for head-disk contact and spacing changes across multiple close points.
Implementation Method 1
The contact sensors are coupled together and to a pair of electrical bond pads of the head and configured to sense for head-disk contact at each of the close points
Data Source
AI summary
A magnetic recording head includes a plurality of writers and at least one reader. The plurality of writers and the reader define a plurality of close points of the head. The plurality of writers are spaced apart from one another in a cross-track direction and positioned in the same plane of the head. A plurality of contact sensors are positioned proximate the plurality of writers and the reader. The contact sensors are coupled together and to a pair of electrical bond pads of the head and configured to sense for head-disk contact at each of the close points.