Look-Ahead Maximum-Likelihood Data Detector For Optical Disk Drives

This paper addresses the detector block used in a Samsung System-on-Chip (SoC) for DVD optical disk drives, which is called look-ahead-detector. This detector has been shown to have applications in data detectors used for hard-disk drives. This new detector also includes a target sample estimator block which provides estimates for the target sample values instead of using the fixed values. With this block, this detector automatically adjusts for the effects of channel impairments such as asymmetry, baseline wandering and mis-equalization.