Design and implementation of channel encoder/decoder for the Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) system

The Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) system is designed to provide CD-quality sounds and flexible data. The DAB system is for not only fixed and portable receivers, but also for mobile receivers. As a result, the DAB system utilizes various levels of error protection including channel encoding and modulation. This paper presents error-correction encoding methods such as energy-dispersal, convolutional encoding, puncturing procedure and time-interleaving. The sub-circuits (energy dispersal and convolutional coding) were realized on an FPGA (Altera EPM7160ELC84-15). The Viterbi decoder was verified by the Matlab simulation.