Experimental studies of nonlinearities in MR heads

Magnetoresistive (MR) heads have been widely developed for high density digital magnetic recording. The nonlinear MR head response causes nonlinear distortion in the playback signals, and this results in a degradation of system performance. In this work, techniques for identifying the nonlinearity due to the playback process have been developed. Different levels of nonlinear distortion in the playback signals were observed for different head/disk combinations. The behavior of the MR nonlinear distortion as a function of flying height and recording density was also examined.