0018-9464 (c) 2013 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information. This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TMAG.2014.2359417, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS - TMAG-14-06-0410.R1 1 1 Dual-Stage Nano-Positioning Scheme for 10 Tbit/in 2 Hard Disk Drives with a Shear-Mode Piezoelectric Single Crystal Micro-Actuator Lei Zhang a , Kui Yao a* , senior member, IEEE, Ehsan Keikha b , Yi Fan Chen a , Md. Arifur Rahman b , Abdullah Al Mamun b , senior member, IEEE, and Charanjit Singh Bhatia b , senior member, IEEE a Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research), 3 Research Link, Singapore 117602. b Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Engineering Drive 3, Singapore 117576. Abstract A dual-stage piezoelectric shear-mode actuation scheme aiming at high density hard disk drive applications is designed, simulated and experimentally evaluated. In this actuation scheme, a shear-mode piezoelectric single crystal micro-actuator is installed between a suspension and a slider for realizing magnetic head nano-positioning in hard disk drives. The piezoelectric single crystal-based shear-mode micro-actuator is dedicatedly designed and made of (1-x)Pb(Zn 1/3 Nb 2/3 )O 3 -xPbTiO 3 (x=0.06-0.07) material to meet the technical specifications of servo control for 10 Tbit/in 2 hard disk drives. The shear displacement of this micro-actuator under a constant voltage is independent of the dimensions of the micro-actuator, which has the great promise for further miniaturization and excellent performance consistency control. Theoretical analysis shows that the first intrinsic resonance of the micro-actuator is around 143 kHz. The shear-mode micro-actuator has a displacement of 25.4 to 30.7 nm at 12 V at frequencies up to 60 kHz. After installed between a suspension and a slider, and tested on a spin-stand, the shear-mode micro-actuator exhibits a working frequency of 39.1 kHz and a displacement of more than 28.3 nm at 12 V under the disk flying condition. The technical feature and performance as achieved show that the dual-stage nano-positioning scheme using a shear-mode piezoelectric single crystal micro-actuator are promising to meet the requirements of servo control for 10 Tbit/in 2 hard disk drives. Keywords: micro-actuator; nano-positioning; piezoelectric; single crystal; hard disk drive. * Corresponding author: Kui Yao, email: k-yao@imre.a-star.edu.sg, telephone: +65 6874 5160, Fax: +65 6872 0785.