Signal Processing and Detection for Array Reader Magnetic Recording System

In the past several years, the single-reader read channel scheme reached its performance limitation. Thus, a new multiple-reader system is evaluated in this paper to have more than one read back signal to improve the hard disk drive performance and capacity. The novel control loops, equalization, and detection are discussed on how to handle the multiple read back signals, estimate head positions based on preamble signal-to-noise ratio, jointly equalize two stream signals as well as detect the final output using pattern-dependent detection.