A Novel Error Correcting System Based on Product Codes for Future Magnetic Recording Channels

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new product code construction combining LDPC and Reed Solomon codes for magnetic recording, along with two decoding algorithms, significantly enhancing error correction performance in noisy and SHE-affected channels.

Contribution

It presents a novel product code design and decoding algorithms tailored for high-density magnetic recording channels, improving error correction beyond existing methods.

Findings

Achieves 1.9dB improvement at BER of 10^-8 over traditional RS decoders.

Significantly better error performance than equivalent LDPC or concatenated codes in mixed error channels.

Effective correction of both AWGN and scattered hard errors in simulated environments.

Abstract

We propose a novel construction of product codes for high-density magnetic recording based on binary low-density parity check (LDPC) codes and binary image of Reed Solomon (RS) codes. Moreover, two novel algorithms are proposed to decode the codes in the presence of both AWGN errors and scattered hard errors (SHEs). Simulation results show that at a bit error rate (bER) of approximately 10^-8, our method allows improving the error performance by approximately 1.9dB compared with that of a hard decision decoder of RS codes of the same length and code rate. For the mixed error channel including random noises and SHEs, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is set at 5dB and 150 to 400 SHEs are randomly generated. The bit error performance of the proposed product code shows a significant improvement over that of equivalent random LDPC codes or serial concatenation of LDPC and RS codes.