A delay-constrained sequence detector is considered for recording channels whose major impediments include intersymbol interference (ISI) and magnetic transition jitter noise. The jitter noise is data-dependent, and a given noise sample is correlated with neighboring noise samples. A sequence detector with a finite decision delay can be formulated in a finite dimensional vector space. For a correlated noise channel, the decision boundary is generally quadratic. We present a technique for obtaining a minimal set of hyperplanes approximating a quadratic decision boundary with a negligible performance loss. In this process, a distance measure, which is consistent with the notion of the effective SNR, is defined and used as a design parameter to trade the complexity and performance. As an achievable performance bound, we derive the effective SNR for the maximum-likelihood sequence detector (MLSD) for these channels. The performance of the partial response maximum likelihood (PRML) detector commonly adopted for current data storage channels as well as the Viterbi algorithm (VA) based on the traditional Euclidean metric, which serves as the MLSD for additive white Gaussian noise, are also analyzed and compared with that of the proposed signal space detector.

A signal space partitioning technique is presented for detecting symbols transmitted through intersymbol interference channels. The decision boundary is piecewise linear and is made up of several hyperplanes. The goal here is to minimize the number of hyperplanes for a given performance measure, namely, the minimum distance between any signal and the decision boundary, Unlike in Voronoi partitioning, individual hyperplanes are chosen to separate signal clusters rather than signal pairs. The convex regions associated with individual signals, which together form the overall decision region, generally overlap or coincide among in-class signals. The technique leads to an asymptotically optimum detector when the target distance is set at half the minimum distance associated with the maximum-likelihood sequence detector. Complexity and performance can be easily traded as the target distance is a flexible design parameter.

A signal-space detector estimates the channel input symbol based on the location of the finite-length observation signal in a multi-dimensional signal-space. The decision boundary is formed by a set of hyperplanes. The resulting detector structure consists of linear discriminant functions, threshold detectors, and a Boolean logic function. Our goal is to minimize the number of linear discriminant functions (hyperplanes) with the same or negligible performance loss relative to the maximum likelihood sequence detector. Given all possible fixed-length signal sequences, our procedure finds a minimal set of hyperplanes by which every pair of opposite class signals can be separated by distance no less than the prescribed minimum distance. The proposed methods are applied to practical magnetic recording channels.