IBM Journal of Research and Development

In the last ten years, the fundamental technology of recording media has evolved from particulate to thin film. The introduction of magnetoresistive heads in 1990 has had further impact on the design of thin-film media. Changes in substrates, magnetic films, overcoats, and lubrication form the basis of the evolution. Design concepts and manufacturing considerations for high-areal-density thin-film... View full abstract»

Disk drives are multicomponent products in which product build variations directly affect quality. Dimensional management, an engineering methodology combined with software tools, was implemented in disk drive development engineering at IBM in San Jose to predict and optimize critical parameters in disk drives. It applies statistical simulation techniques to predict the amount of variation that ca... View full abstract»

Optical disk drives provide an effective solution to the growing need for removable high-capacity storage. In this paper, we review the technology behind the optical disk drives used in IBM's optical storage systems. The basic physics of data recording and readout and the engineering of the primary building blocks of an optical drive (the optical head, the servo system, and the data channel) are d... View full abstract»

The IBM PowerPC 603e™ floating-point unit (FPU) is an on-chip functional unit to support IEEE 754 standard single- and double-precision binary floating-point arithmetic operations. The design objectives are to be a low-cost, low-power, high-performance engine in a single-chip superscalar microprocessor. Using less than 15 mm2 of the available silicon area on the chip (the size of... View full abstract»

The information listed here is supplied by the Institute for Scientific Information and other outside sources. Reprints of the papers may be obtained by writing directly to the first author cited. Journals are listed alphabetically by title; papers are listed sequentially for each journal View full abstract»