A flexible KFCI compensation for Head/media optimization in perpendicular magnetic recording systems

Head/media matching is one of the key procedures used to ensure acceptable performance, reliability and areal density of perpendicular drives. To achieve the optimal bit error rate (BER) performance, head/media optimization is required to handle the variation of each head/media pair within a single drive. Existing optimization uses kilo flux change per inch (KFCI) compensation technique with the fixed slope KFCI value, however, it is unable to handle large variation of the head/media performance. In this paper, we propose to use a flexible KFCI compensation technique between each head/media combination. The relationship between the KFCI slopes and under/over estimation is also established. The result shows that a better BER performance is obtained when compared with the existing technique. In addition, we offer a graphical explanation of the over- and under-compensation issue.