History (1992): Silmag Into Planear Heads

There is no longer an European HDD industry. And in this desert is emerging a French-Italian enterprise to manufacture strategic subsystems for this storage peripheral: magnetic disk heads, with a promising technology based on 18 international patents.

Behind this new company (Grenoble, France), with a comfortable FF50 million capital to start out with, there is Olivetti via its subsidiary Data Magnetics Corp. (Ivrea, Italy) with 30%, 60% of French venture capitals (Sofinnova, Finovelec and Innolion), and finally 10% for the founders named Roberto Gemi (DMC), Hubert Jouve and Jean-Pierre Lazzari who originated the pioneering technology developed at the LETI, the CEA’s (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique) research laboratory. An extra FF15 million is expected to go into the company next year.

The CEA, the LETI’s main company, has given Silmag an exclusive 18-year license to manufacture and sell the new heads worldwide.

Until now, all magnetic disk heads, and even the most thin-film performing ones required a mechanical tooling to make the slider that has to fly at a few thousandths of millimeters from the magnetic disk that is rotating at several thousands of turns per minute.

The Grenoble-based company developed a new manufacturing process, this time completely automated and based on semiconductor VLSI technology, this means that up to 600 heads can be directly cut out of a 4-inch diameter silicon plate at the end of the line. The result of this method is a final product with a precision and a reliability far more superior (a 100,000 start/stop guarantee), a quantity production price lower, and finally it will allow to easily produce heads qualified as planear, smaller and therefore lighter with a faster moving speed.

Manufacturing only requires the use of the former 4-inch VLSI technology, this means that Silmag’s investment into second hand machines won’t be too heavy.

“In the future, we will move to 6 and 8 inches, and each time produce a larger amount of heads. And if it’s necessary we will change from inductive heads to MR (magneto-resistive) ones,” says Lazzari.

According to Silmag: “2μ wide tracks have already been written with these heads, with densities higher than 4,000 bits per mm. The ware of the heads vs. the disk is 8 times less than with competitive heads.”

OEM price of the slider will be between $6 and $13.

The giant Conner Peripherals, Olivetti’s partner for some HDDs, signed a development agreement with Silmag that also started to work with DEC. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Maxtor and Western Digital have already evaluated these new plug-to-plug heads compatible with actual heads.

Silmag’s business plans are to progressively increase production to reach 3 million pieces and FF80 million in 1993, 6 million pieces and FF250 million in 1994, 10 million heads and FF350 million with then 150 employees in 1995 compared with 30 today.

Rejection rate is scheduled at 50% in 1992, 70% in 1993 and 80% in 1994. There are two other disk head plants in Europe, managed by US companies, IBM’s in Germany and Applied Magnetics’ in Dublin (Ireland), a 40,000 square-foot facility.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠48, published on January 1992.

Note: Silmag went into liquidation on June 1998.