ACCELERATING ERROR-CORRECTION DECODER SIMULATIONS WITH THE ADDITION OF ARBITRARY NOISE

In one embodiment, a simulator, e.g., for a hard-disk drive selects for testing a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) value from a range of ratios and an error-correction codeword pattern from a range of codeword patterns. The simulator simulates a communications channel by applying write noise, inter-symbol interference, and read noise to the codeword pattern to generate a noisy signal. In addition, the simulator adds arbitrary-noise to the codeword to accelerate the speed of the simulation. The arbitrary noise increases the probability of converging on a trapping set and does not represent any noise introduced by the communications channel. The simulator attempts to decode the noisy signal, and if decoding is unsuccessful, then the simulator increments an error counter corresponding to the selected signal-to-noise ratio. This process is repeated for all possible combinations of signal-to-noise ratio values and codeword patterns to determine the error rate for all of the signal-to-noise ratio values.