Reliability Test Techniques in Tabu Search Detection for Enhancing BER Performance of Array Reader Bit-Patterned Magnetic Recording Systems

Abstract

Bit-patterned magnetic recording (BPMR) at ultra-high densities is strongly affected by inter-track interference (ITI). To cope with severe ITI, we introduce a reliability-testing mechanism with adaptive symmetric thresholding based on the distribution of log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) to effectively identify unreliable bits while controlling the computational complexity of the Tabu search (TS) detector. Additionally, the selected bits identified from the TS detection are employed to refine the original LLR values through a proposed soft-information adjustment (SIA) process. Moreover, we also present an LLR weighting scheme to further enhance the refined LLRs produced by the SIA process, thereby improving the performance of low-density parity-check decoding. Results indicate that our proposed technique can reduce the complexity of the TS detector by using a reliability-testing mechanism. The SIA can be effectively combined with an LLR weighting scheme, thereby improving bit-error rate performance over conventional BPMR systems.