Thermal asperity detection and cancellation in perpendicular magnetic recording systems

During the defect scanning process on the production line, when asperities are detected on the surface of a magnetic storage medium, that location is marked, and no data are stored to marked locations. However, some asperities go undetected, and cause problems during data recovery. In this paper, we introduce a new method to detect and cancel the thermal asperity effects for perpendicular magnetic recording systems. We compare the new method to the existing methods in terms of the bit error rate after Viterbi detection.