Park Systems Said to Have 90% WW Market of AFM HDD

Park Systems Corp., manufacturer of atomic force microscopy (AFM) systems and nano metrology tools for research labs and industry has announced a 90% market share in the disk storage market for AFM.

Park AFM offers technology and performance unmatched by the competition, the highest accuracy in nanoscale due to the independent XY stage and Z scanner architecture, and flexure based design, the low operating cost by its True Non-Contact AFM, and many automated features for ease of use in failure analysis lab and production environments.

Since 2007, Park has gained a reputation as the technology leader of nanoscale measurement and systems in both research and industry and their client list that includes Harvard, Stanford, NASA, NIST, Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital.

"Our recent successes, which include capturing 90% of the HDD industry market, were accomplished by outperforming our competition," commented Keibock Lee, Park Systems president. "The old technology was riddled with problems and limitations, so Park created a new architecture and perfected the non-contact scanning technology that drastically increased accuracy and usability while bringing down the TCO of AFM tools. The manufacturers switched to Park AFM with the proof that our superior technology would meet their needs in the short and long term."

Park achieved this market share in the disk storage market through a focused effort on customer needs and performance requirements, resulting in a superior AFM product. In this competitive market, where a transition from one vendor to another means eventually replacing all the tools, each costing a million dollars, it is a testament to Park’s customer service and technology strengths that the manufacturers switched vendors.

Park is developing and enhancing their products to meet the increasing industry requirements and they continue to invest in R&D to provide the most advanced AFM for failure analysis and quality assurance.

Park is the only AFM that provides the 3D scanning with rotated head and automated defect reviews which can pin point hundreds of defects in the time it would take less than ten to find in manual method. In the case of its new 3D AFM tool, it allows customers to do side wall angle and roughness measurements that was not possible before. Park also developed and deployed a Programmable Density Scanning for the R/W poles. It is done to magnify the region of interest, enabling customers to do more effective pole tip recession metrology. For the semiconductor and HDD industry, Park AFM can measure below 0.3 angstrom of roughness, now the cutting edge in industry requirement.

Park’s customer service is offered virtually round the clock from both Korea and from the U.S. offices utilizing both remote control and on-site support.