Signal space analysis of head positioning formats

Head positioning formats or servo-bursts are used on disk drives to estimate the off-track position or the position error signal (PES) of the head with respect to a given track. In this paper the signal space technique is used to design estimators (demodulators) for different head positioning formats and to measure their performances. It will be shown that every format corresponds to a closed loop in the signal space and that the performance of a format is proportional to the circumference of the closed loop in signal space.