Soft Feedback Equalization for Patterned Media Storage

Patterned Media Storage (PMS) is one of the promising technologies to overcome the limitations of the conventional magnetic recording. For a high areal density PMS, both inter-track interference (ITI) and inter-symbol interference (ISI), and noise severely degrade the bit error rate (BER) performance of the system. In this work, we develop soft feedback equalization (SFE) to mitigate these adverse effects. We evaluate the performance of SFE by using numerical experiments under different amount of 2D-ISI and noise. Simulation results suggest that SFE is a good candidate for ultra-high capacity PMS. Index Terms— Patterned media, two-dimensional equalization/detection, inter-symbol interference