High-Speed Gap Servo Control for Solid-Immersion-Lens-Based Near-Field Recording System with a Flexible Optical Disk

Higher data storage capacities and higher data transfer rates will be required in next-generation information storage devices. However, there is a limit to the rotational speeds of conventional disk structures. Hence, conventional disks will not be able to achieve high data transfer rates of over 250 Mbps that is required for next-generation storage devices. To increase the data transfer rate of a disk, flexible optical disks have been studied with the goal of stable rotation at a high speed, using a stabilizer to reduce disk oscillations. If a flexible optical disk is implemented in a near-field recording (NFR) system, simultaneous high data transfer rates and high-density recording should be possible. In an NFR system, it is very important to maintain the gap between the solid immersion lens (SIL) and the disk at distances below tens of nanometers. In this study, to simultaneously achieve high data storage capacity and high data transfer rate, we propose an improved gap servo control system for an SIL-based NFR system with a flexible optical disk. To enable robust control at a high rotational speed, a repetitive controller was designed and applied to the NFR servo algorithm. In both simulation and experiment, the newly designed gap servo controller stably maintained the gap distance in the SIL-based NFR system using a flexible optical disk. (C) 2011 The Japan Society of Applied Physics