Television noise reduction IC

A noise reduction IC for consumer television has been designed. The IC contains a spatial filter for Gaussian noise and a temporal filter for clamp noise. To reduce clamp noise, the average value of the pixels in a line-segment are filtered rather than individual pixels. This reduces the cost of the temporal filter significantly, enabling the use of embedded memory. Analog interfaces are provided, as well as a line-locked clock generator. The chip includes a noise level estimator for optimal filtering under varying reception conditions. The average gain of the spatial filter is around 3 dB, whereas the temporal filter yields up to 8 dB improvement on clamp noise.