Implementing new architectures and designs for the magnetic recording read channel have been pushed to the limits of modern integrated circuit manufacturing technology. This book reviews advanced coding and signal processing techniques and architectures for magnetic recording systems. Beginning with the basic principles, it examines read/write operations, data organization, head positioning, sensing, timing recovery, data detection, and error correction. It also provides an in-depth treatment of all recording channel subsystems inside a read channel and hard disk drive controller. The final section reviews new trends in coding, particularly emerging codes for recording channels.

The advent of the internet age has produced enormous demand for in creased storage capacity and for the consequent increases in the amount of information that can be stored in a small space. While physical and media improvements have driven the majority of improvement in modern storage systems, signal processing and coding methods have increasing ly been used to augment those improvements. Run-length-limited codes and partial-response detection methods have come to be the norm in an industry that once rejected any sophistication in the read or write pro cessing circuits. VLSI advances now enable increasingly sophisticated signal processing methods for negligible cost and complexity, a trend sure to continue even as disk access speeds progress to billions of bits per second and terabits per square inch in the new millennium of the in formation age. This new book representing the Ph. D. dissertation work of Stanford's recent graduate Dr. Zining Wu is an up-to-date and fo cused review of the area that should be of value to those just starting in this area and as well those with considerable expertise. The use of saturation recording, i. e. the mandated restriction of two-level inputs, creates interesting twists on the use of communica tion/transmission methods in recording.

This comprehensive text is a revised and greatly expanded second edition of a book first published in 1987, and provides a thorough introduction to the complex fields of signal coding and signal processing. Among the key topics covered are: the fundamentals of pulse code modulation; modern data compression techniques; block and convolutional error control codes; transmission coding techniques; digital filters; infinite and finite impulse response filters; adaptive filters; and fast Fourier transform theory, implementation and applications. Complete with problems and solutions, and containing over 230 diagrams, this textbook will be invaluable to third and fourth year undergraduates in electronic, electrical or communication engineering. It will also act as a useful reference for anyone working in this technologically important field.

Initially, several turbo equalization systems for two-dimensional intersymbol interference (2D-ISI) channels are proposed. The systems' receivers consist of joint 2D-ISI equalizers with an irregular repeat accumulate (IRA) LDPC code.

With the increasing areal density in magnetic recording systems, perpendicular recording has replaced longitudinal recording to overcome the superparamagnetic limit. Studies on perpendicular recording channels including aspects of channel modeling, signal processing and coding techniques are presented in this dissertation. To optimize a high density perpendicular magnetic recording system, one needs to know the tradeoffs between various components of the system including the read/write transducers, the magnetic medium, and the read channel. We extend the work by Chaichanavong on the parameter optimization for systems via design curves. Different signal processing and coding techniques are studied. Information-theoretic tools are utilized to determine the acceptable region for the channel parameters when optimal detection and linear coding techniques are used. Our results show that a considerable gain can be achieved by the optimal detection and coding techniques. The read-write process in perpendicular magnetic recording channels includes a number of nonlinear effects. Nonlinear transition shift (NLTS) is one of them. The signal distortion induced by NLTS can be reduced by write precompensation during data recording. We numerically evaluate the effect of NLTS on the read-back signal and examine the effectiveness of several write precompensation schemes in combating NLTS in a channel characterized by both transition jitter noise and additive white Gaussian electronics noise. We also present an analytical method to estimate the bit-error-rate and use it to help determine the optimal write precompensation values in multi-level precompensation schemes. We propose a mean-adjusted pattern-dependent noise predictive (PDNP) detection algorithm for use on the channel with NLTS. We show that this detector can offer significant improvements in bit-error-rate (BER) compared to conventional Viterbi and PDNP detectors. Moreover, the system performance can be further improved by combining the new detector with a simple write precompensation scheme. Soft-decision decoding for algebraic codes can improve performance for magnetic recording systems. In this dissertation, we propose two soft-decision decoding methods for tensor-product parity codes. We also present a list decoding algorithm for generalized error locating codes.