Beginning Production of Glass Substrates for Hard Disk Drives

Furukawa Electric began, in May this year, the production of glass substrates for hard disk drives (HDDs), which are used in various mobile equipment such as notebook PCs, car navigation systems and digital video cameras.

Developmental Background and Objectives

The market for HDDs used as a data storage device has great potential for growth in future in view of the growing demand for personal computers in emerging countries and digital home appliances such as LCD TVs.

We hold a worldwide market share of about 50% for the raw material of aluminum substrates (aluminum blank material) used in HDDs installed in stationary equipment such as desk-top PCs and servers. This time, by adding the glass substrates for HDDs for mobile equipment to our product lineup, we will be the only manufacturer that operates both aluminum and glass substrates. This business initiative constitutes part of the functional raw materials business strengthening program defined in the medium-term management plan "New Frontier 2012" that Furukawa Electric announced on April 8, 2010. Hereafter, we intend to further expand the HDD-related raw materials business, considering the business is one of the mainstay businesses.

Features of the Product

The glass substrate developed and put to practical use here has the following features.

1. (1)We have developed a manufacturing process for high-precision glass materials, which takes advantage of optical fiber manufacturing technologies. The manufacturing process is expected to be suitable for manufacturing not only glass substrates for HDDs, but also protective panels (cover glasses) for LCDs and glass substrates for organic light emitting displays.
2. (2)The glass substrate for HDDs developed here provides sufficient strength without using "chemical tempering ^{Note 1}" that was conventionally considered as an indispensable process.
3. (3)The glass substrate material developed here has a higher transition temperature ^{Note 2} than the glass materials currently adopted in the market resulting in higher heat resistance, so that the material can advantageously evolve into next-generation HDD technologies of "patterned media ^{Note 3}" and "heat-assisted magnetic recording. ^{Note 3}"

Future Prospects

In the immediate future, we will construct at our Chiba Works a glass substrate production system with a capacity of one million pieces per month, and at the same time, finalize our future plan based on the results of performance evaluation by our customers. We aim at producing, in three years, 20 million pieces of HDD glass substrates and intermediate products per month, in the neighborhood of customers' production bases.

Glossary

(Note 1) Chemical tempering: A process technology for improving the mechanical strength, whereby glass is immersed in molten-salt for ion exchange to form a compressive stress layer on the surface.

(Note 2)Transition temperature: Glass transition refers to a physical phenomenon, in which a macromolecular substance is heated to a high temperature to change from a hard, glass-like state into a rubber-like state. The temperature is called glass transition temperature.

(Note 3) Patterned media and Heat-assisted magnetic recording: Both technologies are a kind of next-generation technology for magnetic recording. While these technologies are considered to enable upgrading of recording density, improvements in heat resistance of substrates are needed for their introduction.