Analog Television, WiMAX and DVB-H on the Same SoC Platform

This paper presents a SW reconfigurable platform, capable of executing in real time both analog and digital television protocols as NTSC, PAL, SECAM and DVB-H. Our platform is also capable of executing WiMAX at 2.9 Mbps in real time, as well as other mobile telephony protocols like 3G UMTS or CDMA200. SW reconfigurability and low power consumption makes our platform suitable for mobile applications. Current analog and digital television systems have been developed in a combination of analog and/or digital hardware due to high computational processing requirements. They are also mostly limited to a single function either analog TV or, digital TV. DSPs in these systems have been limited to speech coding and orchestrating the custom hardware blocks. Despite the fact that in high-performance systems there may be over 2 million logic gates required to implement physical layer processing, the implementation may take many months to finalize. After the logic design is complete, any errors in the design may cause up to a 9 month delay in correcting and refabricating the device. This labor intensive process is counter productive to fast development cycles. In our approach, the entire physical layer is executed in SW using the SB3011 DSP from Sandbridge Technologies (Glossner et al., 2003) allowing fast development cycles and support of multiple functions