Design, fabrication, and wafer level testing of (NiFe/Cu)/sub xn/ dual stripe GMR sensors

In this paper, a new head design, the dual stripe GMR (DS-GMR) is proposed. It consists of two self biased GMR sensors of thickness t, carrying opposite sense currents I, separated by an oxide layer with thickness g. Modeling of the head shows that outputs of 1 mV//spl mu/m trackwidth, with a D/sub 50/ of 300 kfci and PW/sub 50//spl cong/0.1 /spl mu/m can be achieved, which make it suitable for very high density operation. In order to test this DS-GMR sensor, (NiFe/Cu)/sub xn/ GMR multilayers were developed with MR=12% and sensitivity of 0.25%/Oe. DS-GMR sensors were fabricated and tested at wafer level with bottom and top GMR of 4 to 5% for 5 /spl mu/m trackwidths and a gap g=0.2 /spl mu/m.