US Patent Issued to Western Digital Technologies on Sept. 9 for "Method of making a hard disk drive write pole using a tri-tone attenuated phase shift mask" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 10 -- United States Patent no. 12,411,403, issued on Sept. 9, was assigned to Western Digital Technologies Inc. (San Jose, Calif.).

"Method of making a hard disk drive write pole using a tri-tone attenuated phase shift mask" was invented by Xianzhong Zeng (Saratoga, Calif.), Yi Zheng (San Ramon, Calif.), Ming Jiang (San Jose, Calif.) and Donald G. Allen (Morgan Hill, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A write pole of a write head of a hard disk drive can be manufactured by forming a photoresist layer over a magnetic material layer located over a substrate, disposing a tri-tone lithographic mask over the photoresist layer, lithographically exposing the photoresist lay...