David Thompson (engineer)

Thompson has been an active member and supporter of the IEEE Magnetics Society. He served a term as president 1993-4 He was also conference chairman of the first Magnetic Recording Conference (TMRC 1991). Thompson was also a founding member of the Technical Advisory Board of the Magnetics Technology Centre (became Data Storage Institute) at the National University of Singapore. He also served on the advisory board of the Data Storage Systems Center (DSSC) at Carnegie Mellon University.

In 1987, Thompson moved to the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California to take up the role of Director of IBM Magnetic Recording Institute (originally established by Denis Mee). where he became director of the IBM Advanced Magnetic Recording Laboratory and director of the IBM Compact Storage Laboratory. These merged in 1991, to form the Advanced Magnetic Recording Laboratory (AMRL) which Thompson then headed.

Before the commercialization of thin-film recording heads, the data storage industry used ferrite recording heads. A very important attribute of thin-film recording heads was the ability to fabricate such heads with photolithographic methods, which enabled far better dimensional precision than what had been possible with the cutting, grinding and polishing methods employed for making ferrite heads. Thin-film heads were first commercialized in 1980 in the IBM 3370.

In 1968, Thompson joined the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York to join a team led by Hsu Chang. Thompson worked with Luby Romankiw and coauthored a key patent on the design of a thin-film inductive head that would go on to replace existing ferrite head technology. Chris Bajorek joined the team in 1971. The team had started looking at magnetoresistance and on sensors based on this effect. The first applications were related to reading data in bubble memory and on magnetic stripes. The latter did become a commercial success and hand-held card or stripe readers became widespread Subsequently, a major breakthrough occurred when Thompson and the team developed a practical magnetoresistive read head for magnetic recording. These shielded heads offered much higher signal-to-noise ratio than inductive heads and became ubiquitous in tape drives (first in the IBM 3480 in 1984) and then in hard disk drives(first in the IBM 9345 "Sawmill" in 1990). As a result of this work, in 1980, Thompson was named an IBM Fellow, the company’s highest technical honor. Thompson was also designated an IBM Master Inventor

In 1965, Thompson became an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology. His research work was mainly in the areas of microwaves and magnetic thin films.

Thompson grew up in North Dakota and attended Devils Lake High School. He attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now CMU) Department of Electrical Engineering. He received a bachelor's degree in 1962, a master's degree in 1963. In 1966, Thompson received a Ph.D degree supervised by Leo Finzi and Hsu Chang