Probabilistic Data Detection for Probe-Based Storage Channels in the Presence of Jitter

Probe-storage devices employ large arrays of probes to write/read data in parallel in some storage medium. Because of their inherent parallelism and the independence of data retrieved from different probes, these devices lend themselves naturally to low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and associated soft/iterative decoding techniques. In this paper, a concatenated coding scheme for a particular probe-storage channel is presented that comprises an inner (d, k)-constrained code and an outer LDPC code, and the problem of probabilistic data retrieval for this channel is addressed. In particular, soft information is generated by explicitly accounting for the channel output statistics in the presence of jitter and additive noise, based on derived analytical expressions.