High-Efficient Adaptive Modulation for PWM-Based Multi-Level Perpendicular Magnetic Recording on Insufficient Resolution Channel

In this paper, we propose a high-efficient constrained adaptive 5-binary to 4-ternary (5B4T)-modulation in pulsewidth modulation (PWM)-based ternary perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). The high-efficient modulation is required to obtain higher user-bit density (UBD) gain in low-resolution channel, in which transition interval and magnetic-grain size are equivalent on media. In our proposed constrained adaptive 5B4T-modulation, one mapping-set is adaptively selected from the prepared two different mapping-sets to satisfy a specific constraint of ternary signal in modulation block-by-block. For the signal detection in the proposed modulation, we provide a practical solution which is a blind-detection method on likelihood vector. The likelihood vector is re-calculated as joint-metric using the likelihood values of adjacent modulation blocks. By using the vector of joint-metric, a likelihood vector is further generated to decode non-binary low-density parity-check (NB-LDPC) codes. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed adaptive 5B4T-modulated PWM-based ternary-PMR, combined with NB-LDPC codes over GF(32), shows a significant robustness in ultra-low-resolution channel, which occurs magnetization-missing frequently.