In this letter, a method for the construction of polar codes based on the mutual information approximation (MIA) is proposed for the 4Tb/in2 two-dimensional inter-symbol interference (2D-ISI) channels, such as the bit-patterned magnetic recording (BPMR) and two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR). The basic idea is to exploit the MIA between the input and output of a 2D detector to establish a log-likelihood ratio (LLR) distribution model based on the MIA results, which compensates the gap caused by the 2D ISI channel. Consequently, the polar codes obtained by the optimization techniques previously developed for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels can also have satisfactory performances over 2D-ISI channels. Simulated results show that the proposed polar codes can outperform the polar codes constructed by the traditional methods over 4Tb/in2 2D-ISI channels.

In this paper, we demonstrate how to subtract the intertrack interference (ITI) before the decoding process in multi-track multi-head bit-patterned media recording (BPMR) system, which can obtain a better bit error rate (BER) performance. We focus on the three-track/three-head BPMR channel and propose the ITI subtraction technique that performs together with a rate-5/6 two dimensional (2D) modulation code. Since the coded system can provide the estimated recorded bit sequence with a high reliability rate for the center track. However, the upper and lower data sequences still be interfered with their sidetracks, which results to have a low reliability rate. Therefore, we propose to feedback the data from the center and upper tracks for subtracting the ITI effect of the lower track. Meanwhile, the feedback data from the center and lower tracks will be also used to subtract the ITI effect of the upper track. The use of our proposed technique can effectively reduce the severity of ITI effect which caused from the two sidetracks. The computer simulation results in the presence of position and size fluctuations show that the proposed system yields better BER performance than a conventional coded system, especially when an areal density (AD) is ultra high.

In bit-patterned media recording (BPMR), the readback signal is severely corrupted by the inter-symbol interference (ISI) and inter-track interference (ITI), especially at high recording densities, due to small bit and track pitches. One way to alleviate the ITI effect is to encode an input data sequence before recording, so as to avoid some data patterns that easily cause an error at the data detection process. This paper proposes an ITI-mitigating 5/6 modulation code for a multi-track multi-head BPMR system to eliminate the data patterns that lead to severe ITI. Specifically, each of the 5 user bits is converted into a 6-bit codeword in the form of a 3-by-2 data array, based on a look-up table. Experimental results indicate that the system with the proposed coding scheme outperforms that without coding, especially when an areal density is high and/or the position jitter is large.