Application of MTR soft-decision decoding in multiple-head magnetic recording systems

Application of a simple approach for the soft-decision decoding of Maximum-Transition-Run (MTR) codes has been presented in this paper. A lowdemanded hardware realization have been proposed for soft-decision decoding in MTR basic AND, OR and XOR logic circuits. The suggested approach is explored over the two-track, two-head EPR4 partial response magnetic recording system. The overall two-track channel detection complexity reduction of 41·9% is offered in simulation scheme, encoded by Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) code, serially concatenated with inner MTR. The 1·9 dB coding gain has been obtained, comparing to uncoded channel and assuming the AWGN noise presence.