A HAMR Media Technology Roadmap to an Areal Density of 4 Tb/in(2)

This paper discusses heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) media requirements and challenges for areal densities (AD) beyond 1 Tb/in(2). Based on recent roadmap discussions the focus is primarily on granular chemically ordered L1(0) FePtX-Y- perpendicular media with reduced average grain size down to < D > = 3-5 nm relative to current CoCrPt based perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) media with average grain size < D > = 7-9 nm. In HAMR media the combination of thermal conductivity and Curie temperature T-C determines the required laser power during recording. Key challenges are sigma variations of D and T-C which need to be reduced to sigma(D)/D similar to 10-15% and sigma(TC)/T-C similar to 2%. In addition AD is limited by switching field distribution (SFD) and thermal spot size. The key goal going forward is to optimize heads, media, head-media-spacing ( HMS) and read-back channel technologies to extend AD to 4 Tb/in(2) and beyond.