18-Month Project Grant of £575,995 for Ilika and Seagate From Innovate UK

Ilika plc, in materials innovation and solid-state battery technology, received a notification from Innovate UK of its intent to award Ilika and Seagate Technology plc an 18-month project grant of £575,995 to further develop photonic materials and processes for HDD technology, of which £365,698 will be used to fund project activities at Ilika.
 
Seagate is in magnetic recording used in HDD technology and this grant builds on the relationship between Ilika and Seagate to develop HDD technology announced on 25 February 2016. It is also one of the three grant awards referred to in the announcement dated 23 November 2016.
 
Demand for storage is expected to grow by over 40% in the next three years, in part as a result of the movement to cloud storage. Most of the world’s digital information is and will continue to be stored on HDDs. Innovation in the read-write transducer, from which information is recorded and read, is critical to increased HDD data capacity and R/W speeds.

Seagate estimates that 25% of the world’s transducers are manufactured in the UK giving Ilika and Seagate an opportunity to collaborate on this project to meet growing demand for this complex nano-engineered component.

This project will deliver a process for photonic material development with improved data capacity using engineered materials to enable Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). Photonic materials, engineered with new process methods, will boost performance and reliability for HAMR HDDs, decreasing time to market.
 
Commenting on this grant award, Graeme Purdy, Ilika CEO, said: “Ilika welcomes this opportunity to extend our successful collaboration with Seagate. Seagate’s state-of the-art wafer processing capability is a perfect complement to Ilika’s high throughput materials innovation platform.“