R&D: Deep Neural Network Media Noise Predictor Turbo-Detection System for 1D and 2D High-Density Magnetic Recording

IEEE Transactions on Magnetics has published an article written by Amirhossein Sayyafan, Ahmed Aboutaleb, Benjamin J. Belzer, Krishnamoorthy Sivakumar, Anthony Aguilar, Christopher Austin Pinkham, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA, Kheong Sann Chan, Nanjing Institute of Technology, Nanjing, China, and Ashish James, Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR, Singapore.

Abstract: “This article presents a concatenated Bahl–Cocke–Jelinek–Raviv (BCJR) detector, low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoder, and deep neural network (DNN) architecture for a turbo-detection system for 1-D and 2-D magnetic recording (1DMR and TDMR). The input readings first are fed to a partial response (PR) equalizer. Two types of the equalizer are investigated: a linear filter equalizer with a 1-D/2-D PR target and a convolutional neural network (CNN) PR equalizer that is proposed in this work. The equalized inputs are passed to the BCJR to generate the log-likelihood-ratio (LLR) outputs. We input the BCJR LLRs to a CNN noise predictor to predict the signal-dependent media noise. Two different CNN interfaces with the channel decoder are evaluated for TDMR. Then, the second pass of the BCJR is provided with the estimated media noise, and it feeds its output to the LDPC decoder. The system exchanges LLRs between BCJR, LDPC, and CNN iteratively to achieve higher areal density. The simulation results are performed on a grain flipping probabilistic (GFP) model with 11.4 Teragrains per square inch (Tg/in ²). For the GFP data with 18 nm track pitch (TP) and 11 nm bit length (BL), the proposed method for TDMR achieves 27.78% areal density gain over the 1-D pattern-dependent noise prediction (PDNP). The presented BCJR-LDPC-CNN turbo-detection system obtains 3.877 Terabits per square inch (T/bin ² ) areal density for 11.4 Tg/in ² GFP model data, which is among the highest areal densities reported to date.“