Signal processing for digital recording on patterned media

The exponential growth of storage density in magnetic hard disk recording is threatened by the superparamagnetic limit which sets an upper bound to the number of bits per unit area that can be reliably stored. In this paper, a new media for recording called patterned media is described. Some of the signal processing challenges which occur in both writing and reading data are explored. Emphasis is placed on the situation where there is inter-track interference, that is, where the read head senses signals from both the desired track and from neighboring tracks.