Servo Design for High-TPI Hard Disk Drives Using a Delay-Accommodating State Estimator

This paper presents a servo design method for high track-density hard disk drives, in which the plant time delay, mainly due to the processor computation time, is taken into account. The key idea behind the proposed design method is to incorporate the delay model into the output equation of the state-space representation for the plant model; thereby, the delay is accounted for by a standard state observer in a natural manner, with simplified state equations as compared to those for conventional methods. The results from practical application confirm that the proposed method is quite effective in realizing a high-bandwidth servo system in hard disk drives.