User Areal Density Optimization for Conventional and 2-D Detectors/Decoders

The magnetic recording industry is perennially trying to grow the areal density by optimizing the head/media, the coding/signal processing, and the bit length (BL) and track pitch (TP) of the data written on the medium. Writing data at smaller BL or TP on the medium lead to loss of SNR during readback, which can be corrected by the coding and signal processing subsystem at the cost of the code rate R. The optimization of the BL, TP, and code rate for a given head and media is the task of the system integrator. In this paper, we make use of an advanced channel model: the grain-flipping probability model, to perform an equivalent optimization together with a software recording channel that is able to include the impact of the generalized partial response equalizer, soft-output Viterbi algorithm detector, and low density parity check decoder on the final performance. In this paper, we vary the BL, TP, and code rate R in the simulations to search for the highest user areal density achievable for a given head/medium setup. We investigate the effect of having a constant reader width (RW) as well as with RW proportionate to TP in our channel model. We also investigate the effect of more advanced 2-D coding and detection schemes on the final system performance.