Signal Processing Techniques for Enhancing an Areal Density in Two-Reader/Three-Track Detection of Staggered Bit-Patterned Magnetic Recording Systems

As the demand for digital storage capacity continues to grow, bit-patterned magnetic recording (BPMR) has emerged as a promising technology to overcome the superparamagnetic limit of conventional recording methods. Nevertheless, the extremely close spacing of magnetic islands in BPMR can result in significant signal corruption, particularly due to inter-track interference. This paper presents robust signal-processing schemes for a two-reader, three-track detection system in a staggered BPMR configuration to address these challenges. The first proposed method employs a sum-soft-information technique, which combines log-likelihood ratios from two detectors to maximize mutual information. This approach significantly improves the reliability of middle-track detection. We also propose the inter-track interference subtraction technique, in which the highly reliable data recovered from the middle track are used to reconstruct the interference signal, which is then subtracted from the upper and lower tracks using an optimized weighting factor. Simulation results at an areal density of 3.0 Tb/in2 demonstrate that an optimized weighting factor of 1.78 effectively cancels interference. Moreover, the results indicate that our proposed scheme achieves a bit-error rate (BER) comparable to that of the three-reader, one-track detection BPMR systems. Furthermore, our method also demonstrates a lower BER for both adjacent tracks when compared to the conventional single-reader, two-track reading system, even in the presence of 10% media noise.