A MAP-Based Algorithm for Joint Estimation of Transition Jitter and Timing Error

To improve the robustness to timing errors in future high-density perpendicular recording channels where the dominant noise source is transition jitter, this paper proposes a scheme that jointly estimates transition jitter and timing error along with the data recovery. This estimation is based on the intuition that timing error is independent from transition jitter, while both can be quantized and characterized in an extended trellis together with the bit sequence. Simulation results demonstrate significant performance improvement using this scheme, where the cycle-slip dominant bit error rate (BER) is lowered to the same order of magnitude as the detection performance in the absence of timing errors