A Power-efficient Single-chip OFDM Demodulator and Channel Decoder for Multimedia Broadcasting

Large parts of Europe have the ability to receive high-quality digital audio broadcasting (DAB) programs, without distortion, in a mobile environment. This puts pressure on the availability of receivers, which are planned to appear on the market in 1998. For a consumer, not only audio is important: the DAB system allows any combination of audio, video, and data services to be transmitted with a total gross capacity of about 2.3 Mb/s. This paper describes a chip that makes it all possible, the ability to make low-cost receivers for audio, or a full featured video or data receiver. The 4.5-million-transistor mixed-signal device converts 40 MHz analog intermediate frequency and performs all signal processing needed to demodulate and decode a DAB signal to ISO-MPEG transport stream, including full receiver synchronization and deinterleaving using an embedded 0.5-Mb memory.