Abstract
A thermal transmission line model is described and used to study the performance of high track density dual stripe magnetoresistive (DSMR) recording heads. The model was calibrated to actual thermal and signal amplitude data by adjusting sensor material properties. Signal sensitivity per unit track width from the preamp are shown to improve by decreasing the sensor thickness. Further improvement with track density is predicted for smaller aspect ratios. For a square active region (aspect ratio =1.0) no degradation in signal sensitivity was seen up to approximately 19 ktpi.