Generalized belief propagation based TDMR detector and decoder

Abstract

Two dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) achieves high areal densities by reducing the size of a bit comparable to the size of the magnetic grains resulting in two dimensional (2D) inter symbol interference (ISI) and very high media noise. Therefore, it is critical to handle the media noise along with the 2D ISI detection. In this paper, we tune the generalized belief propagation (GBP) algorithm to handle the media noise seen in TDMR. We also provide an intuition into the nature of hard decisions provided by the GBP algorithm. The performance of the GBP algorithm is evaluated over a Voronoi based TDMR channel model where the soft outputs from the GBP algorithm are used by a belief propagation (BP) algorithm to decode low-density parity check (LDPC) codes.