A study of iterative detection method for four-grain based two-dimensional magnetic recording

Two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) is one of the novel magnetic recording technologies for the future ultra-high storage density beyond 10 Tb/in² [1]. However, due to the high areal density, the readback signal is extremely corrupted by the inter-symbol interference (ISI) and the inter-track interference (ITI) in the recorded data retrieving. This problem can be alleviated by utilizing an advanced iterative decoding technique. This paper proposes a novel iterative decoding technique incorporating the iterative detectors and an iterative decoder to combat the severe ISI/ITI. Simulation results show that the proposed technique can reduce the ISI/ITI effect and provides a significant performance improvement in terms of bit-error rate if compared to the conventional receiver, which employs a non-iterative detector.