Lubomyr Romankiw

Lubomyr Taras Romankiw[a] (April 17, 1931 – June 27, 2024) was a Ukrainian-Canadian-American Electrochemist, Material Scientist and Engineer, and a world-renowned inventor.

[1] Although a Canadian citizen, he spent his entire career at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

His Ph.D. dissertation was titled "Kinetics of dissolution of zinc sulfide in aqueous sulfuric acid",[4] under the advisory of Professor P. L. de Bruyn.

While working for IBM, the inventor developed magnetic thin-film storage heads (co-invented with David Thompson in the 1970s), a revolutionary technology for recording and reading information on hard drives.

[11] In 2014, he was elected as a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States for his innovation of thin-film magnetic head structures and electrochemical process technologies for microelectronics device fabrication.

Hand-made and assembled copper-wired heads were becoming too small to become extendible to smaller size and scalable to higher areal density storage per square inch.

The challenges to extend the storage technology at that time were:[16] 1, to achieve areal density beyond 3 Megabits per square inch; and 2, to batch fabricate the read/write heads.

This is the design of an integrated thin film head, which includes both the read and the write functionality, and which remains largely unchanged for decades.

This enables the precise control of the composition of permalloy and other magnetic alloy film in a manufacturing scale.

This is a follow on invention of the previous one, also with a reciprocating paddle for electroplating, but in a vertical configuration, enabling easier and faster loading / unloading of wafers, and also avoiding particle dropping from anode.

[25] Nickel-iron (80:20) alloy thin film electroplating method and electrochemical treatment and plating apparatus.

In addition to the thin film heads, Luby's inventions also contribute to the controlled collapse chip connection, or the flip chip packaging technology for computer processor, copper interconnects, advanced packaging, thin film solar cell, and on-chip inductive power convertor.