Product category:
Programmable Logic Devices
News Release from: Altera Europe | Subject: Stratix II
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 07 September 2007
FPGAs speed Chinese TV developments
Flexibility of FPGA allows TV modulator to support datarates from 4.813 to 32.48Mbit/s for both standard-definition and high-definition signals.
Tsinghua University has used Altera Stratix II high-performance FPGAs to develop China's recently ratified Digital Multimedia Broadcast - Terrestrial (DTMB, also referred to as DMB-TH) national digital television broadcast standard The DTMB standard became the mandatory terrestrial TV signal for Chinese broadcasters on 1st August 2007
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 27 May 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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The Stratix IV family has up to 680K logic elements, 2x bigger than Altera's Stratix III family, which currently comprise currently the largest FPGAs on the market.
The digital video modulation intellectual property (IP) in 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 terrestrial DTMB standard (GB20600-2006) delivers digital television signals to fixed television sets and mobile televisions found on public transportation.
The DTMB standard uses both time-domain synchronous orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing and vestigial sideband multiplexing.
The Stratix II FPGAs are optimal for the standard because the devices include all the logic, DSP blocks and memory required for the application's complex signal processing requirements.
"This new technology is ideally implemented on FPGAs", says Dr Pan, Vice Director at Tsinghua University.
"Altera's support and design tools easily allowed us to bring our innovative algorithms to market".
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 datarates from 4.813 to 32.48Mbit/s for both standard-definition and high-definition TV.
"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", says Liu Ning, Vice Engineer in Chief of Beijing Gigamega Electronics.
"This will shorten our time to market, reduce system costs and create a competitive edge for us in this highly competitive market".
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