US Patent Issued to Western Digital Technologies on May 19 for "Data storage device with jitter-based touchdown detection" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., May 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,633,307, issued on May 19, was assigned to Western Digital Technologies Inc. (San Jose, Calif.).

"Data storage device with jitter-based touchdown detection" was invented by Noureddine Kermiche (Dana Point, Calif.) and Robert Eaton (San Jose, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A data storage device comprises a disk, a recording head, and a thermal fly-height control (TFC) actuator. Write touchdown is detected by writing a reference pattern to the disk at a target TFC power, reading the reference pattern at operational TFC power, detecting write touchdown when a measured timing jitter exceeds a threshold, and writing additional reference...