Detection and Decoding for 2D Magnetic Recording Channels with 2D Intersymbol Interference

This paper considers iterative detection and decoding on the concatenated communication channel consisting of a two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) channel modeled by the four-grain rectangular discrete grain model (DGM) proposed by Kavcic et. al., followed by a two-dimensional intersymbol interference (2D-ISI) channel modeled by linear convolution of the DGM model’s output with a finite-extent 2D blurring mask followed by addition of white Gaussian noise. An iterative detection and decoding scheme combines TDMR detection, 2DISI detection, and soft-in/soft-out (SISO) channel decoding in a structure with two iteration loops. In the first loop, the 2DISI channel detector exchanges log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) with the TDMR detector. In the second loop, the TDMR detector exchanges LLRs with a serially concatenated convolutional code (SCCC) decoder. Simulation results for the concatenated TDMR and 2×2 averaging mask ISI channel with 10 dB SNR show that densities of 0.48 user bits per grain and above can be achieved, corresponding to an areal density of about 9.6 Terabits/in, over the entire range of grain probabilities in the TDMR model. Keywords—Two-dimensional magnetic recording, iterative detection and decoding, rectangular grain model, two-dimensional intersymbol interference