A new performance evaluation technique for iteratively decoded magnetic recording systems

This paper proposes a performance evaluation technique for iteratively (turbo) equalized magnetic recoding systems. The technique decomposes the bit-error rate (BER) function into an integral of two functions. The first function has a closed form expression and is determined by the characteristics of the noise. The second function depends on the parameters of the concatenated system and can be approximated using an interpolation between sample points that rely on a small number of simulations. We present numerical and simulated BER results for coded PR4 and EPR4 channels with turbo equalization. In the "waterfall region" of the BER curves, the calculated and simulated results are within about 0.1 dB.