Implementing a receiver for terrestrial digital video broadcasting in software on an application-specific DSP

Terrestrial digital video broadcasting (DVB-T) is currently being introduced in many European countries and planned to supplement or replace current analogue broadcasting schemes in a large part of the world. It is also considered as an additional downlink medium for third generation UMTS mobile telephones, where a special variant, DVB-H, is under development. Current DVB-T receivers still are built upon dedicated application specific integrated circuits (ASIC). However, designing ASIC is a tedious and expensive task. We show that it is possible to implement a DVB-T receiver in software on an application-specific digital signal processor (AS-DSP). We analyze the computational requirements of a DVB-T receiver and investigate its potential for parallelization. Further, we present our AS-DSP, the M5-DSP, which is based on a novel architecture and design methodology, and report on implementing the core algorithms of a DVB-T receiver on it.