China’s first digital TV broadcast standard launched on Altera’s Stratix II FPGA

Altera Corporation 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 refrerred 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 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.

“This new technology is ideally implemented on FPGAs,” said Dr. Pan, vice director at Tsinghua DTV. “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 data rates from 4.813 Mbps to 32.48 Mbps for both standard-definition (SD) and high-definition television (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 Mr. 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.”

For more information on Altera’s broadcast solutions, please visit http://www.altera.com/end-markets/broadcast/bro-index.html.

Altera