Adjacent track interference due to side reading and BER performance

We investigate the effect of the adjacent track interference (ATI) due to side reading on the bit-error rate (BER), using an E²PR4 recording channel model and Monte Carlo simulation. We focus on how the reader width (RW), writer width (WW), and microtrack profile shape of the reader affect the ATI and the BER. In the Monte Carlo simulation, the RW, the WW, PW₅₀, and amplitude of the head are randomly selected from distributions. For each head, the microtrack profile is randomly selected from a collection of measured profiles. The ATI has strong correlation to the RW/WW ratio, but interestingly, the latter does not correlate to the BER. Further, the tail area of the microtrack profile has strong correlation to both the BER and the ATI.