Silicon micromachined electromagnetic microactuators for rigid disk drives

It is projected that by the year 2001, the disk drive industry will be shipping products with track density on the order of 25,000 tracks-per-inch, which would require a servo bandwidth of at least 3 kHz. This paper presents initial fabrication results of an industry and government supported research project at Caltech and UCLA to develop piggyback electromagnetically driven microactuators for such applications, which are fabricated using the state-of-the-art silicon micromachining techniques.