Thermally stable CGC perpendicular recording media with Pt-rich CoPtCr and thin Pt layers

Abstract

The thermal stability of coupled granular/continuous (CGC) perpendicular media is supported by fundamental modeling and experimental results, including spin-stand testing. By incorporating the interlayer exchange coupling into the model, the simulation result suggests that the CGC structure is capable of achieving the energy barrier of K/sub u/V/k/sub B/T required for 1 Tbit/in/sup 2/ recording density. To demonstrate the CGC approach, we investigate a new class of CGC perpendicular media consisting of a Pt-rich CoPtCr layer with poor Co-Cr phase segregation and a thin Pt layer. The addition of these layers improves the nucleation field of the CoCr/sub 18/Pt/sub 12/ medium from +420 to -600 Oe and the thermal decay of the output is reduced from 2.23% to 0.10% per decade. Unity squareness was obtained by using a thin Pt capping layer and resulted in a small decay rate of 0.21% per decade. The new CGC media showed no degradation of SNR compared to the base granular medium. Similar to CGC media utilizing a multilayer capping structure, the CGC medium with a Pt-rich CoPtCr or Pt capping structure improved the thermal stability without compromising SNR. The simplicity of these new CGC structures also greatly simplifies the deposition process.