Alps Electric to Begin Production of TuMR Thin-Film Head HRUHM Series.

Tokyo, Japan, Mar 15, 2006 - (JCN) - Alps Electric recently announced the development of its new HRUHM Series of 170Gb/square inch high-density recording hard disk drive (HDD) Tunneling Magneto Resistive (TuMR) thin-film heads. Mass production of the HRUHM Series, which will be on display for three days beginning May 24 at the ALPS SHOW 2006 in Tokyo, is scheduled to begin in the first half of this year at the company's Nagaoka plant in Niigata and two cities in China.

Alps TuMR element consists of an insulating layer sandwiched between highly magnetic layers that, when applied with a magnetic field, exhibits a tunnel effect in which an electric signal runs through the insulating body. The thickness of the TuMR element insulation layer is only a few nanometers (1nm: one billionth of a meter), making it a thin, low resistance and stable film - features that are highly sought after. Alps was able to realize a low resistance TuMR element by utilizing materials technology accumulated through its magnetic recorder business as well as process engineering cultivated through the development and production of MR and GMR heads. Alps realized even higher recording density for the recording surface of the write head through the use of the vertical recording system that has been proven to boost recording density, and by shifting from the previous longitudinal system to the perpendicular system. The company is responding to lower flying heights through the use of smaller Femto sliders.

The TuMR element's principal applications are 3.5-inch, 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, 1.0-inch and smaller HDD servers, desktop PCs, notebook PCs, DVD recorders, car navigation systems, mobile audio devices, mobile telephones and other mobile devices.

As demand for increasingly larger capacity HDDs remains strong, the variety of HDD loading electronic components grows increasingly diverse. In addition to mainstream HDD loading devices such as desktop PCs, notebook PCs and DVD recorders, the prevalence of smaller HDD loading products such as mobile telephones and audio devices has contributed to the increased prominence of smaller HDD media. Enhanced read performance on top of magnetic disk recording performance is seen as being extremely important to simultaneously achieving smaller HDDs with higher recording densities. Higher sensitivity TuMR thin-film heads that help realize such high read performance are thus attracting considerable attention.

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