A study of timing recovery for high recording density tape system

A new timing recovery scheme that utilizes the soft-output information of the detector is studied to cope with misdetections of the detector while maintaining an acceptable latency in the feedback loop. It is shown that erroneous feedback in the phase-locked loop caused by misdetection of the detector is the major cause for loss-of-lock in tape systems at high recording densities. Results show that loss-of-lock rate performance can clearly be improved by this new scheme with only a small increase in implementation complexity.