Development of a digital terrestrial front end

BBC Research and Development and LSI Logic are jointly developing a front end for digital terrestrial television transmitted according to the DVB-T specification. The front end consists of two separate components. First, an analogue down-converter that converts the input signal from UHF to a low IF. Second, an integrated circuit that accepts the analogue signal from the down-converter and performs the required DSP operations, which include synchronisation and demodulation, to form a stream of soft decisions suitable for presentation to an FEC decoder. The development process began by agreeing a set of requirements to which the two components must conform. This paper begins by outlining these requirements. During the development of the components, many issues have been considered and resolved. A selection of the key issues and the decisions that were reached is given and, finally, a discussion of the architecture that results from these decisions is presented