The advent of the internet age has produced enormous demand for in creased storage capacity and for the consequent increases in the amount of information that can be stored in a small space. While physical and media improvements have driven the majority of improvement in modern storage systems, signal processing and coding methods have increasing ly been used to augment those improvements. Run-length-limited codes and partial-response detection methods have come to be the norm in an industry that once rejected any sophistication in the read or write pro cessing circuits. VLSI advances now enable increasingly sophisticated signal processing methods for negligible cost and complexity, a trend sure to continue even as disk access speeds progress to billions of bits per second and terabits per square inch in the new millennium of the in formation age. This new book representing the Ph. D. dissertation work of Stanford's recent graduate Dr. Zining Wu is an up-to-date and fo cused review of the area that should be of value to those just starting in this area and as well those with considerable expertise. The use of saturation recording, i. e. the mandated restriction of two-level inputs, creates interesting twists on the use of communica tion/transmission methods in recording.
