Reduced Complexity Neural Network Equalizers for Two-Dimensional Magnetic Recording

Abstract

This article investigates the reduced complexity neural network (NN)-based architectures for equalization over the two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) digital communication channel for data storage. We use realistic waveforms measured from a hard disk drive (HDD) with TDMR technology. We show that the multilayer perceptron (MLP) nonlinear equalizer achieves a 10.91% reduction in bit error rate (BER) over the linear equalizer with cross-entropy (CE)-based optimization. However, the MLP equalizer’s complexity is <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$6.6\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> the linear equalizer’s complexity. Thus, we propose the reduced complexity MLP (RC-MLP) equalizers. Each RC-MLP variant consists of finite-impulse response (FIR) filters, a nonlinear activation, and a hidden delay line. A proposed RC-MLP variant entails only <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.59\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> the linear equalizer’s complexity while achieving a 8.23% reduction in BER over the linear equalizer.