Investigation on target design for perpendicular magnetic recording channels

Abstract

In this thesis, we address the problem of designing optimum generalized partial response (GPR) target for Viterbi detector (VD) based perpendicular recording systems. We design GPR target by maximizing the effective detection signal-to-noise ratio (SNReff), which is an equivalent measure of the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of VD. We derive closed-form analytical solutions for the optimum target based on the SNReff criterion, and characterize the performance surface defined by SNReff. We also propose an approach for designing the optimum GPR target based on the modified SNReff criterion that accounts for the data-dependent media noise. Simulation results show that our approaches yield performance gains compared to the existing techniques.