Modeling of a Disk Drive's Front-End Channel Path

A system approach for designing the channel path of disk drives is required for achieving high data rates and maintaining data integrity. The channel path includes electronics, electrical interconnects, and the read/write heads. The signal transfer through electrical interconnects is affected by its physical components that create the losses and the termination effects. From electromagnetic analysis or measurements, s-parameters are obtained for analyzing signal transfer and crosstalk. Using these s-parameters, chain type matrices can be created to apply an efficient system analysis of the signal transfer. This type of system analysis can be used to produce frequency and time domain response of the complete channel path: read/write transducers, suspension interconnect, read/write IC, flex interconnect, and channel IC