ERCIM News No.26 - July 1996 - INESC
INESC transfers Production Technology to European Manufacturer
by Paulo Freitas
INESC recently entered into a technology transfer agreement with
Silmag (a European manufacturer of disk drive recording heads, based in
Grenoble), for an innovative manufacturing process for the production of
spin valve sensors developed by INESC's Magneto-Optics Group and ASIC Prototyping
Centre.
This type of agreement is original within this field in Portugal and was
only made possible owing to the consistency of the state-of-the-art technological
develop-ment efforts being made by the Centre and the Magneto-Optics Group.
The presentation of currently on-going activities at international conferences
has gained the interest of several multinational electronics companies and
the Centre has already established non-disclosure agreements, permitting
advanced technologies to be shared with companies such as 3M, Thomson, Philips
and Silmag.
The agreement which has just been reached and which is to be followed by
a technical assistance contract during the production stage, will last for
one and a half years and will cater to the transfer of a full spin valve
magneto-resistive manufacturing process based on an architecture developed
by IBM. The sensors will be combined with induction writing heads manufactured
by Silmag using a new totally microelectronics compatible technology (planar
heads manufactured from silicon wafers). This both speeds up the manufacturing
process while making it cheaper than the process employing ceramic substrates
and vertical heads used by other major manufacturers.
SILMAG, which was founded at the end of the eighties and has manufacturing
plants in France and agreements with South Korean companies, has achieved
50% rates of growth in its turnover over the last two years. It is investing
heavily in this innovation for increasing its share of this highly competitive
market.
Please contact:
Paulo Freitas - INESC
Tel: +351 1 3100348
E-mail: ppf@inesc.pt
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