Title:  Multitrack Detection for Magnetic Recording

Committee: 

Dr. Barry, Advisor

Dr. Bloch, Chair

Dr. Ma

Abstract:

The objective of the proposed research is to develop multitrack detection techniques for magnetic recording, and to show that multitrack detection can significantly increase the areal density over single-track detection. Today's state-of-the-art hard-disk drives use single-track detection with one or two readers. However, the advent of multiple readers in magnetic recording opens the door to multitrack detection, where the readback waveforms from multiple readers are used to recover jointly the bits written on two or more tracks.  Multitrack detection offers many advantages over single-track detection, including a doubling of throughput, improved mitigation of intertrack interference, the enablement of modulation and error-control coding across neighboring tracks, and the enablement of two-dimensional bit patterns that can be used to predict noise in both the downtrack and crosstrack directions.  This proposal will focus on developing new techniques for the design and implementation of the equalizer, the target, and the two-dimensional pattern-dependent noise prediction detector for multitrack detection.