LN3  ( Leonard Nanis, nanislen@juno.com)

See poster from 2007 Diskcon Conference here.

This patented technology can be used to create a NiP electroless plated layer on any substrate without the use of environmentally hazardous pre-plating solutions.  LN3 has numerous applications where a flat, smooth, solderable, and bright surface is required on aluminum, aluminum alloy, or aluminum-composite materials.

For hard disk drive applications a sputtered layer of a special seed material is laid down on the disk substrate.  This seed layer provides a much smoother layer for follow-on electroless plating of NiP and thus results in a much smoother NiP coating.  As a consequence less grinding and polishing is required to create a sputter ready substrate.  Since electroless NiP can be textured using conventional disk texturing tools for longitudinal recording orientation or for general tribology characteristics it can transform any material such as glass, steel, etc. into a substrate that can be prepared using conventional aluminum blank finishing and texturing technology.  Since the LN3 technology provides planarization it can reduce the requirements for substrate finish.  The net benefit of LN3 technology is:

• reduction of the cost of substrate preparation
• increase in production capacity with existing capital equipment
• making available a wider selection of substrate materials for hard disk drives
• extending the useful life of longitudinal recording and allowing high density longitudinal recording on glass disks and other materials
• allow for tribology texturing of perpendicular recording media using conventional texturing operations
• reduce the creation of environmentally hazardous plating chemicals

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