IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 49, NO.

6, JUNE 2013 2823

EXIT-Chart-Based LDPC Code Design for 2D ISI Channels

Lingjun Kong , Yong Liang Guan , Jianping Zheng , Guojun Han , Kui Cai , and Kheong-Sann Chan
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore
State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks, Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071 P. R. China
Data Storage Institute (DSI), Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR), Singapore 117608, Singapore

In this paper, optimization of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes to approach the symmetric information rate (SIR) of two-di-
mensional (2-D) intersymbol interference (ISI) channels is proposed for high-density magnetic recording, such as bit-patterned magnetic
recording (BPMR) and 2-D magnetic recording (TDMR). The code design makes use of the modified Extrinsic Information Transfer
(EXIT) chart, where the optimal variable node degree is searched by selecting the best check node degree to fit the check node decoder
(CND) EXIT curve to the EXIT curve of the variable node decoder (VND) curve combined with 2-D detector. Simulation results show
that LDPC codes with code length 10 bits optimized for a 2-D ISI channel corresponding to 4 Tb/in recording density can achieve bit
error rate 10 at signal-to-noise ratio 0.33 dB away from the SIR. To our knowledge, this is the first capacity-approaching LDPC code
successfully optimized for a 2-D ISI channel.
Index Terms—Extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, symmetric information rate (SIR),
two-dimensional (2D) intersymbol interference (ISI) channels.

I. INTRODUCTION open until now. Since magnetic recording only permits binary
channel codes, we aim for the symmetric information rate (SIR)

D UE to continued strong demand for increasing storage

areal densities, bit-patterned magnetic recording (BPMR)
and two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) have re-
cently been extensively researched [1]. One way to boost the
storage density is to reduce the separation between recording
tracks. However, this results in more crosstalk between the
tracks, called intertrack interference (ITI). The read-back signal
of both the BPMR and TDMR can be modeled by the signal
corrupted by a two-dimensional (2-D) intersymbol interference
(ISI) which is constituted by both 1-D ISI and ITI [2]–[4].
Coding for a 1-D ISI channel has received much attention,
with excellent performance improvement obtained by applying
the turbo principle to equalization and decoding [5]–[10]. In [5]
and [6], the authors designed LDPC codes optimized for partial
response channels (PRCs) by means of a density evolution anal-
ysis. Brink used an extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart
to design low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes for a multiple
input/multiple output (MIMO) channel [7]. A concatenated ap-
proach to design LDPC codes can also be found in [8], where the
authors performed EXIT chart-based analysis for a decoder in
which a soft-input/soft-output (SISO) block, featuring a BCJR
algorithm [9] for the PRCs, iteratively exchanged extrinsic in-
formation with a SISO decoder associated to the binary code.
In [10], an optimization algorithm was derived for LDPC codes
based on a Gaussian approximation of the messages exchanged
in the graph.
Experiments show that LDPC codes optimized for AWGN
channels may not yield good performance when applied to 1-D
ISI channels with equalization [10]. Therefore, we infer that a
new class of LDPC codes adapted to the 2-D ISI channel is re-
quired for BPMR and TDMR, which will be verified in the se-
quel. To our best knowledge, the problem of designing a ca-
pacity-approaching LDPC codes for a 2-D ISI channel has been
[11] of the 2-D ISI channel, which is defined as the maximum in-
formation rate achievable via random coding with equiprobable
input symbols. Since linear codes such as LDPC code use all in-
puts equiprobably, the SIR is also the maximum rate achievable
with LDPC codes.
In this paper, we extend Brink’s idea to design LDPC codes
that achieve the SIR of a 2-D ISI channel based on the EXIT
chart. Unlike normal degree optimization through EXIT chart
fitting [7], we start with the EXIT curve of the combined 2-D de-
tector and variable node decoder (VND) and perform the degree
optimization by matching the check node decoder (CND) EXIT
curve to the combined 2-D detector and VND EXIT curve. The
main advantage of this code optimization approach is that the
EXIT curve of the combined 2-D detector and VND can be ob-
tained by statistical averaging over a large number of 2-D de-
tection simulations.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II in-
troduces the 2-D ISI channel model. Then in Section III, LPDC
codes design for 2-D ISI channels is proposed based on the mod-
ified EXIT chart. The performance of the proposed scheme is
investigated in Section IV where the simulation results are pre-
sented. Finally, Section V presents some conclusions.
II. 2-D ISI CHANNELS MODEL
Let denote the binary data distributed in an
array with rows and columns, with , and
. and denote the interference lengths
in the horizontal and vertical directions, respectively. Further-
more, let the 2-D channel response before equalization be rep-
resented by an channel response matrix

Manuscript received November 28, 2012; revised February 05, 2013; ac-
cepted February 16, 2013. Date of current version May 30, 2013. Corresponding
author: L. Kong (e-mail: ljkong@ntu.edu.sg). .. .. .. ..
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online . . . .
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMAG.2013.2248351 (1)

0018-9464/$31.00 © 2013 IEEE

2824 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 49, NO. 6, JUNE 2013

Then, the received signal at position can be expressed

by

(2)

where and are noncausality offsets, and is the

AWGN with zero mean and variance . Fig. 1. Joint 2-D-DET and decoder scheme for LDPC code optimization.
Normally, the offsets are set to be and
. We assume a boundary of 1 around the the and from a histogram of the extrinsic
data block for initializing the 2-D detector, i.e., for information values, where denotes the element of .
. Given the and , we calculate the mutual
As the magnetic recording technology only “writes” signals information of 2-D detector by
in discrete binary levels, we adopt the SIR, defined as the infor-
mation rate when the channel inputs are independent, uniformly
distributed (i.u.d.) and equiprobable [11], as the capacity of the
magnetic recording channel.
The SIR of a 2-D ISI channel is defined as (4)
where the integral in (4) is estimated using a histogram with bins
defined based on the extrinsic values.
SIR In the following, we denote the 2-D detector by 2-D-DET and
its EXIT function by
(3)
(5)
where denotes the mutual information. The arrays
and denote the binary data array and received signal
array, respectively. A simulation-based method for computing Note that for each and code rate of interest, a new
the SIR has been proposed in [11], employing the Shannon- EXIT curve of the 2-D detector needs to be created.
McMillan-Breiman theorem and the two-way generalized belief
propagation algorithm. We refer the readers to [11] for further B. EXIT Curve of LDPC Code With 2-D Detector
details on how to calculate the SIR of 2-D ISI channel.
The joint 2-D-DET and decoder scheme for LDPC code opti-
mization is shown in Fig. 1, where the dashed box corresponds
III. CODE DESIGN FOR 2-D ISI CHANNELS to the combined 2-D-DET and VND by , where the
At the heart of this paper is the design of LDPC codes that at- and quantities at various locations denote the a priori
tempt to achieve the SIR for writing and reading over 2-D ISI mutual information and a posteriori mutual information of the
channels. Following the notations used in [12], we define an en- corresponding signals at those locations.
semble of LDPC codes with the variable and check node degree We assume that messages entering a degree check node
sequences and , from its associated variable nodes to verify they are Gaussian
where and denote the fraction of edges connected to vari- distributed. It is more convenient to use the following simple
able nodes of degree and check nodes of degree , respectively. approximation to compute the mutual information of the CND
And let and be the number of different variable node de- of a degree check node based on the duality theorem
grees and check node degrees, respectively. [7]
The ISI-optimized LDPC codes are designed by selecting the
best sequences to fit the CND EXIT curve as closely as pos- (6)
sible to the EXIT curve of the combined 2-D detector and VND,
while ensuring that they do not cross over.
where the functions and are given in [7]. From (6)
A. EXIT Curve of 2-D Detector we can obtain the EXIT function of an average check node as
Computing the EXIT curve of the 2-D detector is similar to
computing the EXIT curve of the MIMO detector with com-
bined demodulation/decoding structure in a multi-antenna wire-
less communication system [7]. The only difference lies in the
way to calculate the a posteriori mutual information ,
given the a priori mutual information and the observed (7)
2-D-ISI channel output sequence . The 2-D detector EXIT
curve cannot be expressed in closed form, so we evaluate it
by Monte Carlo simulation, statistically averaged over a large From (7), the check node EXIT curves can be computed in
number of 2-D detection simulations. closed form fairly accurately as
Once and are generated, the channel detection is
run. The 2-D detector output log-likelihood ratio (LLR) are (8)
used to calculate the , which is measured by estimating
KONG et al.: EXIT-CHART-BASED LDPC CODE DESIGN FOR 2D ISI CHANNELS
Based on [7, (4)], the lower VND in Fig. 1 maps into
(9)
Then the combined 2-D-DET and VND EXIT function of a
degree variable node is
(10)
where the in (4) will be approximated by a third-order
polynomial based on Fig. 3 (to be shown as follows).
It has been shown that the EXIT curve of a mixture of codes is
an average of the component EXIT curves. The effective VND
transfer curve is thus
(11)
where , and is the fraction of
nodes incident to variable nodes of degree .
The ISI-optimized LDPC codes can be designed by matching
the CND EXIT curve (8) to the mixed 2-D-DET and VND EXIT
curve (11). This design problem is equivalent to solving the fol-
lowing linear programming problem:
(12)
subject to
where is the total of samples whose step is denoted by
between sample and in the optimization.
IV. SIMULATIONS
Simulations are conducted to evaluate the properties and bit
error rate (BER) performance of the proposed LDPC codes
which are optimized for a 2-D ISI channel. In the simulations,
we set the maximum number of iterations between the 2-D
symbol-based BCJR detector [9] and the LDPC decoder to 10,
and the maximum number of message propagation iterations in
LDPC decoder to 30.
Fig. 2 compares the capacity of the Binary input-AWGN (BI-
AWGN) channel with the SIRs of 2-D ISI channels. The 2-D
2825
Fig. 2. Estimated SIR of 2-D ISI channels ( and ).
channel response matrices are assumed to be (13) and (14), cor-
responding to a magnetic recording density of 1 and 4 Tb/in ,
respectively [2], [3]. In (13) and (14), the row of the matrix
corresponds to the down-track direction, and the column cor-
responds to the cross-track direction. If we compare (13) and
(14), we can see that compared to the case of 1 Tb/in , the ISI
is increased to 0.2299 and the ITI is decreased to 0.1435. The
increase of ISI is due to the increase of recording density in
the down-track direction, while the decrease of ITI is mainly
due to different choices of bit-aspect-ratio (BAR). In particular,
for the 1 Tb/in case, a is chosen, while for the 4
Tb/in case, a is chosen for the sake of reducing
ITI as suggested by the HDD industry. We observe from Fig. 2
that as the recording density increases, the 2-D-ISI channel has
a rate loss relative to the BI-AWGN channel, especially in the
low regime. On the other hand, the capacity gap between
the BI-AWGN channel and 2-D ISI channel closes up when the
is very large, which agrees with intuition
(13)
(14)
The EXIT curves of 2-D-DET are shown in Fig. 3. We ob-
serve that all the curves resemble straight lines, so the EXIT
curves of 2-D-DET can be approximated by a third order poly-
nomial which allow us to express the term in (10) in
closed form.
In Fig. 4, we compare the designed LDPC codes with the
conventional LDPC codes optimized for AWGN channel [7],
in 2-D ISI channels with recording density of 1 and 4 Tb/in ,
respectively. The optimized variable node degree sequences of
the designed codes are given in Table I. All codes have rate
of 8/9. All schemes use joint symbol-based BCJR 2-D channel
detectors [9] and belief-propagation LDPC decoders. SIR and
SIR denote the SIR of 1 and 4 Tb/in channel, respectively,
taken from Fig. 2.
Fig. 4 shows that the performance of our designed code is
about 0.2 dB superior to that of LDPC code optimized for
2826
TABLE I
VARIABLE NODE DEGREE SEQUENCES OF LDPC CODE OPTIMIZED FOR 2-D ISI AND AWGN CHANNELS
Fig. 3. EXIT curves of 2-D-DET at . NSFC under Grant 61201140.
Fig. 4. BER performance for 2-D ISI channels ( and ) with the de-
signed LDPC codes and the LDPC codes optimized for AWGN channel.
AWGN channel at the BER of 10 for two different code
lengths ( ) in the 2-D ISI channel with
recording density of 4 Tb/in . When the recording density de-
creases to 1 Tb/in , about 0.1 dB performance gain is achieved.
This suggests that with increasing recording density of a
2-D ISI channel, the performance gain between the designed
ISI-optimized code and conventional AWGN-optimized code
increases.
We also see that the designed codes achieve a BER of 10 at
less than 0.7 dB away from the SIR for
and about 0.33 dB away from the SIR for in 2-D
ISI channel with recording density of 4 Tb/in .
Finally, Fig. 4 shows that the optimized codes for the 1 Tb/in
channel has about 0.4 dB gain in real coded performance over
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 49, NO. 6, JUNE 2013
the 4 Tb/in channel, which coincides with the SIR gap (theo-
retical performance) in Fig. 2.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, new LDPC codes optimized for a 2-D ISI
channel have been designed based on EXIT curve fitting of
modified EXIT charts. Monte Carlo simulation results have
verified that our designed LDPC codes for 2-D ISI channel can
achieve better performance than codes optimized for AWGN
channel, and yield BER of 10 at 0.33 dB away
from the SIR for a code length of 13824 in 4 Tb/in magnetic
recording channel.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by A STAR Singapore under Grant
SERC0921560129. The work of J. Zheng was supported by the
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