Center for Magnetic Recording Research

Research Interests

Dr. Hughes current work at CMRR includes research on recording physics and channels; a new disk technology to replace thin film called patterned media; intelligent disk drives for intelligent storage systems and to allow product differentiation for drive manufacturers; experimental magnetic tape and disk programs; and disk drive failure prediction.

He is principal investigator of the S.M.A.R.T., iStor/iDrive, and Secure Erase projects. S.M.A.R.T. is the UCSD/CMRR research program for experimental monitoring and databasing of disk drive failure warning data, for analysis by statistical hypothesis testing, data mining, artificial intelligence, and pattern recognition techniques. The iDrive project studies putting computing tasks inside disk drives, managed by intelligent storage systems, beyond the historic disk drive role of data storage and retrieval. These programs are sponsored by the UCSD Information Storage Industry Center, a Sloan Foundation Center.

Biography

Gordon Hughes received his BS in Physics and Ph.D in Electrical Engineering at Cal Tech. He did digital magnetic recording research at Xerox PARC on oxide and thin film plated discs, on heads and channels; and then formed a development group at Seagate to commercialize new recording technology, where he helped to establish sputtered thin film metallic recording media as todays commercial standard.  

Gordon joined CMRR in 1997 as Associate Director. He has published many technical papers on recording physics and recording channels, has several patents, and was a Distinguished Lecturer for the Magnetics Society of the IEEE in 1989 and 1998.

In 2001, he was named Fellow of the IEEE for "contributions to magnetic recording physics and for pioneering work in thin film disk media".  

His current work at CMRR includes research on recording physics and channels; a new disk technology to replace thin film called patterned media; intelligent disk drives for improved storage systems and to allow product differentiation for drive manufacturers; experimental tape and disk magnetic recording programs at CMRR; and disk drive failure prediction.

He is principal investigator of the S.M.A.R.T. and iDrive projects. S.M.A.R.T. is the UCSD/CMRR research program for experimental monitoring and databasing of disk drive failure warning data, for analysis by statistical hypothesis testing, data mining, artificial intelligence, and pattern recognition techniques. The iDrive project studies putting computing tasks inside disk drives, beyond their basic role of data storage and retrieval.  These programs are sponsored by the UCSD Information Storage Industry Center, a Sloan Foundation Center.

Recent Publications:

"Improved Disk Drive Failure Warnings", IEEE Trans. Reliability, September 2002

"Wise Drives", IEEE Spectrum Magazine, August 2002

"Viterbi Detector with Added Noise Detection Channel", 2002 IEEE Intermag Conference, Amsterdam

"Patterned Media – the Promises and the Problems", 2002 IEEE Intermag Conference, Amsterdam (invited)

"Patterned media," Chapter 7, The Physics of High Density Magnetic Recording, edited by Jan van Ek, Dieter Weller, and Martin Plumer (Springer, Heidelberg, June 2001)

"Trends in Disk Drives and Data Security", Information Technology Study Group Workshop, April 5-6, 2001, San Diego California (invited)

"Magnetic analysis of contact head/tape spacing spacing", IEEE Trans. Mag., 36, no. 6 Nov 2000 (co-author)

"Patterned media write designs", IEEE Trans. Mag., 36, No. 2, March 2000

"Analysis of tape surface roughness by magnetic recording and mechanical methods", IEEE Trans. Mag., 36, No. 1, January 2000 (co-author)

"Vertical and horizontal patterned media writing", 1999 IEEE Intermag Conference, Korea, May 1999 "Read channels for patterned media", IEEE Trans. Mag., 35, No. 5, 2310-2312, Sept. 1999

"Read channels for patterned media", IEEE Trans. Mag., 35, No. 5, 2310-2312, Sept. 1999 

"Bit errors due to channel amplification of media jitter", 1997 IEEE Intermag Conference, New Orleans, IEEE Trans. Mag., 34, 5, Sept. 1998

"Time interval analysis errors in measuring recording media transition jitter", IEEE Trans. Mag., 33, No. 6, Nov 1997

Publications

Research Group

Lab Assistant:

Student Name: Daniel Commins

email: dcommins@ucsd.edu

Phone: (858) 534-0026

Office: CMRR Room 103