Performance comparison of a class of multi-level DFE and PRML detectors in the presence of channel nonlinearities

Nonlinear transition shift (NLTS) and partial erasure (PE) are two channel nonlinearities that degrade bit-error-rate (BER) performance of detectors at high densities. In this paper, we compare BER performances of partial response maximum-likelihood (PRML) detectors developed for (0, k) run-length-limited (RLL) coded channels with multi-level DFE (MDFE) family detectors at different levels of nonlinearity. Bit-by-bit simulations indicate that the MDFE family detectors are relatively robust to NLTS and PE compared to the PRML detectors. Results also show that the M3DFE detector, an advanced detector in the MDFE family, outperforms the other detectors at high densities under channel nonlinearities.