Reduced Complexity Neural Network Equalizers for Two-dimensional Magnetic Recording

Abstract: This paper investigates reduced complexity neural network (NN) based architectures for equalization over the two-dimension magnetic recording (TDMR) digital communication channel for data storage. We use realistic waveforms measured from a hard disk drive (HDD) with TDMR technology. We show that the multilayer perceptron (MLP) non-linear equalizer achieves a $10.91\%$ reduction in bit error rate (BER) over the linear equalizer with cross-entropy-based optimization. However, the MLP equalizer's complexity is $6.6$ times the linear equalizer's complexity. Thus, we propose reduced complexity MLP (RC-MLP) equalizers. Each RC-MLP variant consists of finite-impulse response filters, a non-linear activation, and a hidden delay line. A proposed RC-MLP variant entails only $1.59$ times the linear equalizer's complexity while achieving a $8.23\%$ reduction in BER over the linear equalizer.