Speaker:  Elnaz Banan Sadeghian

Title:
Detection and Synchronization for 2-D Magnetic Recording

Abstract:
The disk drive industry is currently pursuing a huge increase in the recorded data density up to 10 Terabits per square inch of the medium through two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR). This novel technology advances the conventional one-dimensional recording by shrinking the widths of the data tracks to such an extent that an attempt to read data from one track will inevitably lead to interference from neighboring tracks. The combination of interference between different tracks and along adjacent bits on each track is a key challenge for TDMR and motivates the development of two-dimensional signal processing strategies of manageable complexity to mitigate this two-dimensional interference. To address this issue, we propose a novel detection strategy for TDMR recording channel with multiple read heads. As a practical preference, instead of assuming that the entire disk is available for processing, we restrict our attention to only a small subset of adjacent tracks. Our method works by suppressing the intertrack interference with a combination of linear combining and soft interference cancellation. This suppression reduces the detection problem to a traditional one-dimensional problem, so that we may leverage existing one-dimensional iterative detection strategies. Simulation results show that the proposed detector is able to reliably recover five tracks from an array of five read heads at an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio. Obtained results from this research can help greatly increase hard disk capacities through the realization of TDMR.

Speaker Bio:
Elnaz Banan Sadeghian received her B. Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran, in 2005 and her M.Sc. degree in biomedical engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2008. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. degree in Telecommunication at the School of ECE, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA. Her current research is synchronization and detection for two-dimensional magnetic recording.