Appeal No. 95-5142
Application 08/078,917
to eliminate Barkhausen noise and to maintain the sensor in
its most linear operating range (col. 1, lines 11-14).
Layers 2, 4, and 6 of the prior art device shown in
Appellant's Figure 1 appear as layers 34, 36, and 38,
respectively, in Appellant's Figure 2, which shows his
invention as additionally including an exchange layer 32
adjacent to the biasing layer, i.e, soft adjacent layer 34,
and on the opposite side of the soft adjacent layer from the
spacer layer 36. This exchange layer, which is in electrical
and magnetic continuity with soft active layer, produces a
field transverse to MR layer 38 that enables saturation of the
soft active layer 34 either without a sense current or a
relatively low sense current (Spec. at 3, lines 31-35),
thereby reducing the size of the sense current and thus the
power supply (Spec. at 2, lines 5-11).
As in the prior art device shown in Appellant's Figure 1,
Appellant's transducer includes a hard magnetic bias layer 44
and a conductive layer 42 for generating longitudinal biasing
of the MR layer (Spec. at 4, lines 3-16).
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