Soft intertrack interference cancellation for two-dimensional magnetic recording

We propose a detection strategy for the two-dimensional magnetic recording channel with multiple read heads, in which intertrack interference is suppressed by a combination of linear combining and soft interference cancellation. This suppression reduces the detection problem to a traditional one-dimensional detection problem, so that we may leverage existing iterative detection strategies based on turbo equalization. Simulation results show that the proposed detector is able to reliably recover five tracks from an array of five read heads at an E_b/N₀ value of 8.4 dB, when the tracks are independently coded with a rate-1/2 length-65536 LDPC code.