Ferroelectric drive for data storage

Abstract

Ferroelectric thin films can hold non-volatile memories with bit sizes down to 30 nm at room temperature. This invention provides a data storage system that preferably comprises an electrically conducting rotatable hard disk substrate having a ferroelectric storage layer that comprises storage cells which can be written and read along concentric recording tracks, a pivoted servo arm with a free end for movement across the recording tracks. The free end of the servo arm includes both a write head, consisting of an electrically conducting tip, and a read head, consisting of a field effect transistor (FET), held close to the disk surface. The FET has a gate electrode and is positioned on the servo arm with the gate electrode held close to the ferroelectric surface of the disk during read operations of the data storage system. Read and write operations can be performed with standard semiconductor technologies in combination with existing magnetic hard-disk servo-control architecture. Such ferroelectric hard disk data storage systems are expected to increase the areal storage density of hard disks beyond the superparamagnetic limit of around 40 GB/in2.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.