David was born and has lived in San Diego all of his life. Upon graduating from Bishop's High School in 1990, he went to a community college for two years and transferred into University of California, San Diego (UCSD) where he completed his undergraduate work in mechanical engineering in the spring of 1996. David then continued on into graduate school at UCSD where he is working on his Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering. David began work at CMRR in the summer of 1997 where he is conducting research in the area of dual stage actuators for hard drives.
In present disk drives, track densities approach 10K tracks per inch, and it is likely that track densities of 25K per inch will be achieved by the turn of the century. In order to obtain track densities on the order of 25K tracks per inch, it is necessary to optimize the servo performance of the actuator and, at the same time, minimize all dynamic disturbances of the disk drive components. These disturbances are, among others, non-repeatable spindle run-out, suspension vibrations, disk flatter as well as air-induced vibrations.
To optimize track density in magnetic hard disk drives, dual stage actuators have recently been explored. In a two stage actuator, a coarse positioning scheme is used to position the head in the neighborhood of the track to be read, while a fine positioning servo is used to make sure that the head stays on the desired track without substantial deviations. One proposed solution is to use piezoelectric material to position the read/write head on a micro-meter scale.
Last updated: Oct. 12, 1998