Abstract: A magnetic sensor is disclosed having a shallow contiguous junction. Such a sensor is can greatly increase yield for mass-produced heads, especially for large wafers. The magnetic bias layers can be aligned with a free layer of the sensor, improving performance. Milling may be terminated prior to penetration of an antiferromagnetic layer, so that for example the antiferromagnetic layer may extend significantly beyond the free and pinned layers of the sensor.

Abstract: Magnetoresistive (MR) sensors are disclosed that have leads that overlap a MR structure and distribute current to and from the MR structure so that the current is not concentrated in small portions of the leads, alleviating the problems mentioned above. For example, the leads can be formed of a body-centered cubic (bcc) form of tantalum, combined with gold or other highly conductive materials. For the situation in which a thicker bcc tantalum layer covers a highly conductive gold layer, the tantalum layer protects the gold layer during MR structure etching, so that the leads can have broad layers of electrically conductive material for connection to MR structures. The broad leads also conduct heat better than the read gap material that they replace, further reducing the temperature at the connection between the leads and the MR structure.