EXIT chart based IRA code design for TDMR

Abstract

This paper presents an extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart based irregular repeat-accumulate (IRA) code design technique for a two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) turbo-equalizer that employs a Voronoi magnetic grain model. The channel model also includes two-dimensional inter-symbol interference (2D-ISI) and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). At high bit densities (e.g., between 1 and 3 magnetic grains per coded bit (GPB)), occasionally a bit will not be written on any grain, and hence will effectively be “overwritten” (or erased) by bits on surrounding grains. The proposed code design takes into account the statistics of the TDMR channel to decrease overwrite effects. The proposed receiver uses a 2D-ISI BCJR equalizer and IRA decoder in a turbo-equalization approach. To design the IRA code, we find the experimental EXIT chart curves of the check node decoder (CND) and the combination of the variable node decoder (VND) with the 2D-ISI equalizer. We fit the VND and CND EXIT chart curves to find the IRA code's optimized variable node degree distribution for the TDMR channel. Simulation results show that the IRA codes optimized for the TDMR Voronoi grain model achieve up to a 3.3% density increase in user-bits/grain (U/G) compared to IRA codes designed for AWGN channels. At 1.2 GPB, the designed IRA codes achieve densities as high as 0.455 U/G, corresponding to an areal density of about 4.6 Terabits/in2 on typical magnetic hard disks with 10 Teragrains/in2; this is nearly a factor of 5 better than the best commercially available systems.