Optimal combination of detection and error correction coding for magnetic recording

This paper presents models and techniques for fairly comparing detection systems for magnetic recording and for choosing the optimal tradeoff between Error Correction Control (ECC) overhead and detection performance. Models are presented for soft bit error rate (SBER), Hard Bit Error Rate (HBER), and optimization for both standard and modified concatenated coding schemes. The effect of error propagation of the RLL code is taken into account providing a more realistic method for comparing overall system performance of different combinations of detector, RLL code, and ECC.