Channel Modeling and Equalizer Design for Staggered Islands Bit-Patterned Media Recording

In this paper, we first present a recording physics based analytical channel model for bit-patterned media recording (BPMR) systems with staggered islands configuration. We further propose an analytical approach to jointly design the equalizer with partial response (PR) target for BPMR systems, by using the minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) criterion with monic constraint, taking into account inter-track interference (ITI) and media noise. Simulation results show that the proposed approach performs better than the system designed without considering ITI and media noise. We further investigate the performance of staggered array against regular array islands with bit-aspect ratios (BAR) of 1 and 2, and with different amount of media noise, inter-symbol interference (ISI), and ITI. We found that staggered array islands with BAR of 2 offer better bit error rate (BER) performance and better tolerance to media noise.