Digital Baseband Transmission and Recording

Rating:
Summary: Excellent applied signal processing text
Review: This is an excellent introductory text for optical recording (CD and DVD), magnetic recording (hard disk drives, tape), and baseband receivers (DSL). In its treatment of recording systems, it presents in a coherent and unified fashion information otherwise found only in journal papers. It also covers some of Dr. Bergmans' own work done at Philips, one of the creators of CD (along with Sony). It is written at a level of mathematical rigor accessible to senior level electrical engineering or applied mathematics students, grad students and working engineers.

The book deals primarily with the signal processing techniques used to convert the noisy, corrupted analog readback signal (or the received signal in the case of a baseband receiver) into a stream of 1s and 0s. It also provides an overview of the types of modulation codes used to encode the digital information prior to recording or transmission, and why they're important. (Also see the book by Immink, another Philips alumnus, for a more detailed treatment of modulation codes.)

Note that the Bergmans book does not include many aspects of a complete data storage system, since such a magnum opus would require several volumes. For example, it excludes control theory as applied to actuator motion control, disc and file formats, MPEG compression, host interface protocols, or other "higher level" functions. It also doesn't cover Reed-Solomon or other error control codes. There are other excellent texts on ECC (Wicker; Lin and Costello; etc.). That notwithstanding, this text is in fact a self-contained treatment of what is customarily called a "read channel" in the data storage industry.

I've used this book extensively, and I'd highly recommend it to any read channel engineer working at a drive or IC company, or to any student planning to enter the data storage industry.