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NEWS RELEASE READ-RITE
---------
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
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CONTACTS: Read-Rite Corporation Kekst and Company
Steve Polcyn Andrea Bergofin
408-956-2217 Todd Fogarty
Media: Jerry Parrott 212-593-2655
408-956-2400
READ-RITE SHIPS 10 MILLIONTH MAGNETORESISTIVE HEAD
AS MARKET CONTINUES SHIFT TOWARD NEW TECHNOLOGY
MILPITAS, CA -- March 11, 1997 -- Read-Rite Corporation (NASDAQ: RDRT) announced
today that it has reached the 10 million milestone in shipments of
magnetoresistive (MR) recording heads and has successfully ramped up MR
production at state-of-the-art facilities in Fremont, California and at
Read-Rite SMI, its joint venture in Osaka, Japan.
Addressing the Morgan Stanley Semiconductor & Systems Conference today
in Laguna Niguel, California, Cyril J. Yansouni, chairman and chief executive
officer, said, "Over the past three quarters, Read-Rite MR recording heads have
been used in four major customer programs, including both desktop computer and
high-end server applications."
Recording heads "read" and "write" information from and to a computer's
hard drive. "The key advantage of magnetoresistive, or MR, recording heads over
inductive technology is that the 'read' element and the 'write' element can be
designed separately. With MR, we can separately optimize the 'read' element for
maximum sensitivity, which makes possible higher areal densities, and optimize
the 'write' element for the best writing performance. The end result is better
performance, whether the end-user has a laptop or a server," explained Ralph
Patterson, senior vice president, research and development. "Advanced inductive
thin-film heads have one element that both reads and writes. This leads to
design compromises and ultimately limits the potential to continue moving to
higher areal densities."
Mr. Yansouni said that he expects demand for rapidly increasing
disk-drive capacity to continue into the future. "Disk-drive capacity doubles
every 18 months," he said, "and Read-Rite is very aggressive in investing in the
research and technology to enable us to maintain that pace."
"We are making good progress with our development of the Giant MR
technology that we believe will ultimately replace MR, much as MR is currently
replacing advanced inductive," he said.
Read-Rite's Giant MR technology includes "spin valve" and
"perpendicular-to-the-plane Giant MR" (Cpp-GMR). The company's Cpp-GMR sensor,
developed in conjunction with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was
recognized by Research & Development Magazine as an R&D 100 Award recipient in
1996. The company said that this sensor is an ultra-high-density magnetic sensor
with the potential to increase hard disk information storage capacity
significantly beyond that of conventional MR.
Read-Rite Corporation is the world's leading independent manufacturer
of recording heads, head gimbal assemblies (HGAs) and head stack assemblies
(HSAs) for disk drives and magnetoresistive heads for quarter-inch-cartridge
tape drives. The company is headquartered in Milpitas, California and has
operations in Thailand, Malaysia, The Philippines and Singapore. Read-Rite also
has a strong presence in Japan through Read-Rite SMI Corporation, its joint
venture with Sumitomo Metal Industries, Ltd. Read-Rite employs some 20,000
people. The company's home page on the World Wide Web can be reached at
www.readrite.com.
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