Estimating Interference with a Two-Dimensional Viterbi Algorithm for Bit-Patterned Media Recording

Abstract

Bit-patterned media recording (BPMR) is proposed as a candidate for future magnetic data storage to overcome superparamagnetism. The distance between magnetic islands in BPMR must be reduced to increase the areal density (AD). As magnetic islands become closer, two-dimensional (2D) interference is increased, including intersymbol interference (ISI) based on the down-track direction and intertrack interference (ITI) from the cross-track direction. We propose an estimator to predict interference from neighboring (upper and lower) tracks. This estimator exploits the 2D Viterbi algorithm (VA) with reduced states. We removed the interference from the neighboring track and applied a simple 1D VA to detect the received signal. The simulation results show that our model performs better than previously proposed models.