A Novel ITI Suppression Technique for Coded Dual-Track Dual-Head Bit-Patterned Magnetic Recording Systems

Generally, an intertrack interference (ITI) is a critical problem in bit-patterned magnetic recording (BPMR) systems that can attain an areal density (AD) up to 4 Tb/in2. Unavoidably, at high ADs, a very narrow track width must be employed, leading to severe ITI and unacceptable system performance. To tackle the ITI; therefore, this article introduces a novel ITI suppression technique for coded dual-track dual-head (DTDH) BPMR systems. At the first turbo iteration, the weighted readback signal of the adjacent track served as an estimated ITI signal is utilized for subtracting from the target readback signal to subside the ITI effect, before passing the refined readback signal to a turbo equalizer. Nonetheless, for the second turbo iteration onwards, the estimated ITI signal generated by the soft information obtained from a decoder at each turbo iteration will be then employed to subtract from the target readback signal during the turbo decoding process. Computer simulation results demonstrate that the proposed system can provide better performance than the DTDH system using a hard ITI suppression technique as well as the conventional system using one read head to decode one data track for all ADs, because the proposed technique can estimate the ITI signal well. Furthermore, when considering the recording system under the effects of media noise and track mis-registration, we also found that the proposed system is more robust than other systems.