Apparatus for Inspection of Low-Coercivity Magnetic Force Microscopy Tips

In hard disk drive manufacturing, magnetic force microscopy (MFM) is employed to provide feedback for process control. This requires accurate and precise measurement of the intensity and the width of the write field generated from fabricated recording heads. Thus, the response of MFM tips when exposed to the write field must be consistency, run to run and machine to machine; however, no specific tool that can inspect and separate out-of-spec or defective MFM tips is available so far. In this present work, we designed and developed a new apparatus that is suitable to quantitatively evaluate the performance of low-coercivity MFM tips. The detailed discussion of the design of the proposed system is given as well as the inspection algorithm. Basically, a solenoid coil is used as a magnetic field generator which can generate the field strength up to 500 Oe, enough to saturate the tip magnetization. When the tip was exposed, a phase difference of the oscillating MFM tip, which is directly proportional to the field intensity, is employed as a measure of the tip response. In addition, the capability of the implemented apparatus to inspect low-coercivity MFM tips was demonstrated. Results were then compared with those obtained from a conventional MFM machine with the reference magnetic write head as a test sample. Several tests with different sets of low-coercivity MFM tips were carried out to evaluate the implemented system. Results showed that it can distinguish the response of different MFM tips; however, as the results were not too different, only three samples were selected to present here, including the tips with typical magnetic response, low response and out-of-spec response. The measured phase shifts of those samples were 54.5 ± 0.3, 36.3 ± 0.3 and 15.4 ± 0.2 degrees, respectively.