Nowadays, disk drive actuator manufacturers are pushing up the specifications of the product in order to satisfy the requirements of the next generation of hard disks. However, the existing equipments used in production still cannot satisfy these needs. Although the manufacturer has laser measuring device to control the product quality, this device has many limitations which make the measurements inaccurate. For the manufacturing equipment point of view, the variation of production is too large and many defects appear. To improve the actuator manufacturing for the disk drive industry, my research is focused on developing new equipment by applying the state of the art measuring method, capacitance sensing technology. Similar to the laser measuring method, the capacitance measuring method...[ Read more ]

Nowadays, disk drive actuator manufacturers are pushing up the specifications of the product in order to satisfy the requirements of the next generation of hard disks. However, the existing equipments used in production still cannot satisfy these needs. Although the manufacturer has laser measuring device to control the product quality, this device has many limitations which make the measurements inaccurate. For the manufacturing equipment point of view, the variation of production is too large and many defects appear. To improve the actuator manufacturing for the disk drive industry, my research is focused on developing new equipment by applying the state of the art measuring method, capacitance sensing technology. Similar to the laser measuring method, the capacitance measuring method targets the non-contacted measuring proposes. Within greater measuring accuracy and stability than the laser measuring device, the quality control for the actuator product has improved. Besides improving the accuracy in measuring the disk drive actuator, an automated adjustment mechanism has also been developed which increases the product yield by automated adjustment.