Customer Reviews

Digital Baseband Transmission and Recording

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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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.

This is one of the best books I have read on equalization. The way author presents decision feedback equalization as an extension of Partial response equalization is very nice and makes the DFE theory conceptually easy to grasp, I have not seen this kind of presentation in other materials Eg Proakis,Cioffi.

The book presents relevant mathematics but in a far more informal way than other text books - Math is emphasized but there is lots of stress on intuition.

One thing is the author's presentation style is bit terse, you need to read every line carefully.
Also each chapter builds on previous chapter, this is good and bad. Good thing is if this is your main book, then this makes the text much more flowing but if you just want to read one chapter, then its hard

I enjoyed the book especially the portions on equalization, I have not gone into other aspects like Timing recovery yet, Once I go through it, I will update the review accordingly
One thing regarding his exercise problems are they are not that extensive nor rigorous, hence in an academic setting, this book may not fare that well relative to other books written by Proakis etc

Highly recommended for any graduate student, practicing engineer or any other serious practitioner of Baseband Signal processing

This book is recommended reading to all DSP engineers at our company. It covers only Baseband digital communications which is perfect for people interested in backplane SERDES, Ethernet 10/100/1000/10GBASE-T, and magnetic recording applications. Not covering passband carrier modulation and analog communications lets one concentrate on the above fields of interest. It avoids too many mathematical derivations and covers a great deal of material in a simplified manner. However, in my opinion this book would make a terrible introduction to the subject. Unless you already pretty much know the subject, following what is presented is very hard. Once you know the subject to some extend then it might be a very good book to reference as I don't know any other book that covers so many related topics -- some to great detail. There are 3 chapters on timing recovery; chapters on Viterbi coding; Equalization (Linear, Partial Response, DFE); Modulation and Encoding. The book has an interesting way of presenting mixed discrete time and continuous time signaling. It has excellent references to published papers and other books. (Although they might be a little dated.) There are people who told me that the book is very easy reading, but once again, unless you somewhat know the material already I don't recommend this book as an introduction to the subject.

Since I was somewhat not satisfied with this book, I ordered "Precoding and Signal Shaping for Digital Transmission" by Robert F. H. Fischer. It seems to cover similar subjects but in a more standard manner.