China’s First Digital TV Broadcast Standard Launched on Altera’s Stratix II FPGA

Altera Corp. has announced that its Stratix II high-performance FPGAs were used by Tsinghua DTV 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 August 1, 2007.

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 (OFDM) and vestigial sideband multiplexing. The Stratix II FPGAs are optimal for the standard because the devices include all the logic, digital signal processing (DSP) blocks 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 4.813Mbps to 32.48Mbps for both standard-definition (SD) and high-definition television (HDTV).

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