Polar Channel Coding Schemes for Two-Dimensional Magnetic Recording Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes new two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) systems using polar channel coding as practical error correction coding. It is known that the time and space complexities of the encoding/decoding algorithms based on polar channel coding are $\mathcal {O}(N \log N)$ , where $N$ is the codeword (block) length. If we compare the error-correction performance of a polar code with that of a low-density parity-check (LDPC) code in the same rate, it is known that the polar code has a longer length and its decoder still has a lower implementation complexity than the LDPC decoder. Therefore, relatively low-complexity coding schemes are preferable for any TDMR systems under high rates and relatively long codeword lengths. In this paper, the proposed TDMR system serially concatenates a two-dimensional (2-D) modulation code with one-dimensional (1-D) polar codes in each down-track direction. These element polar codes are designed on the fundamentals of the channel polarization theory, which are applied for channels with memory. Actually, it evaluates the performance of the signal processing scheme with concatenated coding and generalized partial response equalization for the proposed TDMR system using bit-patterned media by computer simulations. As a result, it shows that the block error rate performance of the proposed TDMR system with the 2-D modulation and polar channel coding schemes is superior to that of the 1-D system with the conventional 1-D high rate modulation and LDPC coding schemes.