Altera FPGAs power China's first DTV launch

Altera Corp. announced its Stratix II FPGAs were used by Tsinghua DTV to develop China's recently ratified Digital Multimedia Broadcast-Terrestrial (DTMB) national DTV broadcast standard.

The digital video modulation intellectual propertyin the standard will be used by all digital TV system suppliers providing video transport equipment to broadcasters in China. Supported by China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), the DTMB standard (GB20600-2006) delivers DTV signals to fixed TV sets and mobile TVs found on public transportation.

The DTMB standard uses both time-domain synchronous OFDM and vestigial sideband multiplexing. The Stratix II FPGAs are optimal for the standard because the devices include all the logic, DSPblocks and memory required for the application's complex signal processing requirements.

The Stratix II FPGA's architecture provides the system's timing structure, channel coding and forward error correction. The flexibility of the Stratix II FPGA also allows the modulator to support data rates from 4.813- to 32.48Mbps for both standard-definition (SD) and HDTV.

"Tsinghua DTV is one of the major contributors to the DTMB standard, and by adopting this solution, it enables us to focus on system-level development, which reduces the design time and cost," said Liu Ning, vice engineer in chief of Beijing Gigamega Electronics Co. Ltd. "This will shorten our time-to-market, reduce system costs and create a competitive edge for us in this highly competitive market."

Altera Corp. announced its Stratix II FPGAs were used by Tsinghua DTV to develop China's recently ratified Digital Multimedia Broadcast-Terrestrial (DTMB) national DTV broadcast standard.

The digital video modulation intellectual propertyin the standard will be used by all digital TV system suppliers providing video transport equipment to broadcasters in China. Supported by China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), the DTMB standard (GB20600-2006) delivers DTV signals to fixed TV sets and mobile TVs found on public transportation.

The DTMB standard uses both time-domain synchronous OFDM and vestigial sideband multiplexing. The Stratix II FPGAs are optimal for the standard because the devices include all the logic, DSPblocks and memory required for the application's complex signal processing requirements.

The Stratix II FPGA's architecture provides the system's timing structure, channel coding and forward error correction. The flexibility of the Stratix II FPGA also allows the modulator to support data rates from 4.813- to 32.48Mbps for both standard-definition (SD) and HDTV.

"Tsinghua DTV is one of the major contributors to the DTMB standard, and by adopting this solution, it enables us to focus on system-level development, which reduces the design time and cost," said Liu Ning, vice engineer in chief of Beijing Gigamega Electronics Co. Ltd. "This will shorten our time-to-market, reduce system costs and create a competitive edge for us in this highly competitive market."