Generalized Interlaced Magnetic Recording With Flexible Inter-Track Interference Cancellation

In this paper, interlaced magnetic recording (IMR) is generalized with a flexible inter-track interference cancellation (F-ITIC) scheme to enhance the overall areal density capability (ADC) by balancing and mitigating the mutual ITI between neighboring tracks. The IMR showed ADC gain by interlaced recording of aggressive bit density (BD) top and relaxed BD bottom tracks, where asynchronous ITI mitigation was applied to the bottom ones. On the other hand, IMR configuration can be generalized by the selective write width control, such that narrower relaxed BD top tracks are recorded over wider aggressive BD bottom tracks. In this generalized IMR (G-IMR), balanced ITI between interlaced tracks can provide ADC gain over legacy IMR (L-IMR) and customized F-ITIC for both tracks can further increase the gain. Note that the ITI processing scheme for G-IMR should be flexible in order to manage the ITI signals from high BD affecting low BD tracks, or vice versa. To evaluate the performance of G-IMR with the F-ITIC, numerical evaluations are conducted with the micro-pixelated magnetic channel model. The results show that G-IMR provides a favorable tradeoff between both tracks' BDs and track density associated mutual ITIs, which offers a tangible ADC gain with the ITI cancellation over the L-IMR.