Romankiw speaks on pioneering work at Ukrainian Engineers' Society (10/17/04)

Romankiw speaks on pioneering work at Ukrainian Engineers' Society

by Ivan Durbak

NEW YORK - The Ukrainian Engineers' Society of New York City recently presented a lecture by Dr. Lubomyr T. Romankiw, noted research scientist and IBM Fellow at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. at the Ukrainian Institute of America. The topic was "Magnetic Hard Disc Storage Past, Present and Future."

Dr. Romankiw started with an overview of computer disk technology, history and environment. He then provided a detailed description of plating through mask technology used in thin film heads in magnetic storage, which he pioneered several decades ago. Dr. Romankiw originally conceived and developed, and has since updated, the entire fabrication process, which to this day is the basis for the manufacturing of magnetic storage heads around the world.

Every PC in the world today typically houses a magnetic disk based directly on the work of Dr. Romankiw. As one of the audience suggested, just as each PC typically shows a sign "Intel Inside" for the CPU chips, there should perhaps be a similar indicator on each PC showing "Dr. Romankiw Inside" for the hard disk.

Dr. Romankiw described how the original hard disk drive, RAMAC 305, introduced by IBM in 1957, had an areal density of 2,000 bits/inch square and used copper wire hand-wound ferrite cores as read-write heads. Today commercial systems approach storage density of 100 Gigabits/square inch. In laboratory tests heads capable of 150 Gigabits/square inch are being investigated - a density once thought to be unattainable. This represents eight orders of magnitude increase in areal density in 47 years.

Four orders of magnitude of this jump were achieved since commercial introduction by IBM, of the inductive, multi-turn, batch fabricated thin film heads in 1979. Since introduction of the first thin film heads the cost of storage has dropped four orders of magnitude, the data rate has increased several orders of magnitude. This has had a significant effect on enabling desktop and laptop computers, data mining and the Internet. Data stored half way around the world are found and analyzed, and the results delivered through high speed interconnections in fractions of seconds.

Dr. Romankiw presented the technology that was originally invented at the T. J Watson Research Center of IBM in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and which was developed jointly with IBM San Jose, Calif., into a commercial process used today to manufacture thin film heads throughout the world. Since the invention of the batch fabrication process for the thin film heads, magnetic storage has undergone two paradigm shifts. Today we stand on the verge of one more paradigm shift which, while using the fundamental processes developed some 35 years ago, promises to extend magnetic storage density another one to two orders of magnitude.

Dr. T Romankiw is an IBM Fellow at the T. J. Watson Research Center, with which he has been associated since 1962. He received his early education in Ukraine, his B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Alberta in 1957, and his master's and doctoral degrees in metallurgy and materials from MIT in 1962.

He holds 57 patents, has over 120 published inventions, published more than 150 scientific papers, authored six book chapters and has edited 10 volumes of symposia proceedings in the areas of: magnetic materials, processes and devices; and electrochemistry in electronics.

His research has dealt with nearly all aspects of electroless plating, electroplating, etching, lithography and micro-fabrication used in electronics. He developed an entirely new approach to use of lithography and micro-fabrication techniques, applied them to magnetic head fabrication and then extended them to X-ray lithography mask fabrication, plating of thin film chip carriers, C-4 interconnects and copper metallization of silicon chips.

For his seminal contributions to magnetic storage technologies Dr. Romankiw in 1994 received one of the highest honors of the Electrochemical Society, the Vittorio de Nora Medal; one of the highest honors of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Morris A. Lieberman Award. He was named an IEEE Fellow in 1996. "For his major contributions to science, technology and in particular for demonstrating manufacturing worthy processes which created a $7 billion thin film head industry," he was awarded in 1993 the highest honor of the Societies of Chemical Industries, the Perkin Gold Medal.

Throughout this presentation Dr. Romankiw kept the audience engaged and involved with a balance of highly technical material and practical real-world problem examples - and especially with the enthusiasm and excitement still evident after his four decades of cutting-edge research on this topic.

The June 2 lecture was the fifth in a series of engineering and scientific presentations sponsored by the Ukrainian Engineers' Society of New York City during the 2003-2004 year.

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