Improved Thermal Asperity Suppression in Perpendicular Recording Channels

This paper proposes an improved thermal asperity (TA) detection and correction technique for perpendicular recording channels, which performs better than the conventional one. The TA detection method is a threshold-based approach, while the TA correction method is performed by averaging the readback signal and applying a curve-fitting technique to estimate the TA signal. Then, the corrected readback signal is obtained by subtracting the TA-affected readback signal by the reconstructed TA signal. Results indicate that the proposed technique yields lower bit-error rate than the conventional one and is also robust to changes in the peak TA amplitude.