Analysis of error-correction constraints in an optical disk

The compact disk read-only memory (CD-ROM) is a mature storage medium with complex error control. It comprises four levels of Reed Solomon codes allied to a sequence of sophisticated interleaving strategies and 8:14 modulation coding. New storage media are being developed and introduced that place still further demands on signal processing for error correction. It is therefore appropriate to explore thoroughly the limit of existing strategies to assess future requirements. We describe a simulation of all stages of the CD-ROM coding, modulation, and decoding. The results of decoding the burst error of a prescribed number of modulation bits are discussed in detail. Measures of residual uncorrected error within a sector are displayed by C1, C2, P, and Q error counts and by the status of the final cyclic redundancy check (CRC). Where each data sector is encoded separately, it is shown that error-correction performance against burst errors depends critically on the position of the burst within a sector. The C1 error measures the burst length, whereas C2 errors reflect the burst position. The performance of Reed Solomon product codes is shown by the P and Q statistics. It is shown that synchronization loss is critical near the limits of error correction. An example is given of miscorrection that is identified by the CRC check. (C) 1996 Optical Society of America