Interative stripewise trellis-based symbol detection method and device for multi-dimensional recording systems

摘要

When processing a two dimensional data area it is known to be advantageous to divide the two dimensional are into stripes and process each stripe using a stripe-wise detector. The stripe being processed shifts row per row downwards. Each stripe has as its output the bit-decisions of the top bit-row of the stripe which is the most reliable. That output bit-row is also used as side-information for the bit detection of the next stripe which is the stripe which is shifted one bit-row downwards. The bit-row just across the bottom of the stripe on the other hand still needs to be determined in the current iteration, so only the initialisation bit-values can be used in the first iteration of the stripe-wise bit-detector. In order to prevent the propagation of errors towards the top bit row of the stripe the relative weight for the bottom branch bit in the figure-of-merit is reduced from the full 100% to a lower fraction.