A simulation of air bearing surface materials with copper substrate for corrosion investigation

Corrosion defect is one of the important defects found in hard disk drive manufacturing. Fail to detect this defect might lead to fatal hard disk drive failure. In general, corrosion defect was found after the end of process. The fundamental methodology used to measure corrosion defect in head magnetic process of hard disk drive manufacturing is Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). This method applies a low frequency voltage to a chemical cell in order to measure corrosion rate which is defined as a reaction of material in aqueous solution. The data obtained from EIS measurement method are complex and thus hard to analyze. Furthermore, EIS method is destructive materials measurement and the obtained results cannot well predict corrosion behavior of the system. However, head magnetic materials/slider is a stack of three materials in layers i.e. soft magnetic layer, diamond like carbon (DLC) layer, and photoresist layer respectively. These three stack layer of slider can be replaced by R-C equivalent circuit. Nyquist plot and Bode plot are used to observe the frequency response of the equivalent circuit. This observation can help in prediction of corrosion behavior before starting of mass fabrication or transferring to new materials. This work shows that the results obtained from an equivalent R-C circuit model of copper substrate coated with photoresist and the one obtained from EIS method are comparable. It should be noted that the parameters of R-C equivalent circuits are modified for corrosion behavior studying according to two different types of photoresists.