Designed MMSE equalizers for nonlinear magnetic recording channels

Writing process in hard disk drives (HDD) is affected from nonlinearity. Normally, nonlinearity is not easy to be avoided or removed since it is unexpected and caused by various sources. In this paper, we review a description of a nonlinearity behavior by using a Volterra model, and using a random binary number to generate an input data. The Volterra model can describe both linear and nonlinear parts of the read-back signals in terms of the volterra equations. In addition, we propose to use an MMSE method to equalize the read-back signals with nonlinearity using various constraints before applying the Viterbi detector. For a 2nd-order Volterra model, the results show that the equalizer with g₁ =1 constraint gives the lowest MMSE values. Furthermore, as the nonlinearity level increases, the bit error rate (BER) performance degrades.