An Analog Decoder for Concatenated Magnetic Recording Schemes

This paper presents an all-analog iterative decoding network for an EPR4 magnetic recording system. A powerful serially concatenated architecture is considered, consisting of a simple outer code, an interleaver with reasonable size and a rate 1 EPR4 channel as inner code. The analog chip design is based on analog 0.18 μm CMOS technology. Simulation results for both digital and analog implementations are shown. Practical implementation issues such as considerations of mismatch effects over performance are also discussed