Burst error identification for turbo- and LDPC-coded magnetic recording systems

Although turbo- and low-density parity check (LDPC) codes provide very low bit-error rates, when these inner codes are used in conjunction with an outer error correction code (ECC), the overall recording system performance is based on the sector failure rates. Therefore, it is crucial to identify the blocks having more errors than the ECC correction capability. In this paper, we introduce several "burst error identification" techniques for turbo and LDPC codes. We discuss the effectiveness and the drawbacks of these methods over additive white Gaussian noise and partial response channels.