Multilevel interleaved Reed-Solomon codes using soft information for magnetic recording channels

Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are commonly utilized in magnetic recording systems to correct error bursts. Soft-output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA) is a commonly used detector to provide soft information to error-correcting decoders. We propose a novel architecture of multilevel interleaved RS coding scheme that not only provides better performance but also has less complexity than an equivalent RS code. This architecture implements an error event detector using the soft information generated by the SOVA detector.