Goleta, California-based Applied Magnetics Corp has signed up with Eastman Kodak Co for joint development and fabrication of thin-film magnetoresistive tape heads for quarter-inch cartridge tape drives: Kodak’s San Diego Research Laboratories will fabricate thin-film magnetic tape devices at the wafer level, and these will be built into recording heads by Apllied Magnetics’s Tape Division at its Santa Maria, California facility; magnetoresistive technology represented something of a breakthrough in head design when it was introduced by IBM Corp in 1991, enabling substantially higher densities than the previous generation inductive thin-film heads; inductive write-magnetoresistive read heads will be used in the QIC 255 and QIC 500 drives.
