Signal space detection for recording channels with jitter noise

Abstract

A delay-constrained sequence detector is considered for recording channels whose major impediments include intersymbol interference (ISI) and magnetic transition jitter noise. The jitter noise is data-dependent, and a given noise sample is correlated with neighboring noise samples. A sequence detector with a finite decision delay can be formulated in a finite dimensional vector space. For a correlated noise channel, the decision boundary is generally quadratic. We present a technique for obtaining a minimal set of hyperplanes approximating a quadratic decision boundary with a negligible performance loss. In this process, a distance measure, which is consistent with the notion of the effective SNR, is defined and used as a design parameter to trade the complexity and performance. As an achievable performance bound, we derive the effective SNR for the maximum-likelihood sequence detector (MLSD) for these channels. The performance of the partial response maximum likelihood (PRML) detector commonly adopted for current data storage channels as well as the Viterbi algorithm (VA) based on the traditional Euclidean metric, which serves as the MLSD for additive white Gaussian noise, are also analyzed and compared with that of the proposed signal space detector.