Channels and Codes for Magneto-optical Recording

Optical recording has advanced rapidly over the past decade, but many of the component parts are still evolving. The data recording channel how user data are written and recovered is no exception. This tutorial paper outlines the technology used in the optical recording channel (concentrating on magneto-optical recording), and describes some of the major formats, codes, and data detection methods which are being developed. Many of these are new enough ideas that hardware demonstrations and measurements are not yet available. We use, therefore, a sophisticated software model of the optical recording channel to make comparisons of the performance that can be expected from various channels of interest. © 1992 IEEE