Universal cable modulator

News

Altera and Commsonic have joined forces to deliver what they claim is the industry’s first FPGA to integrate the entire forward error correction and modulation chain for digital broadcast over cable.

Altera

and

Commsonic

have joined forces to deliver what they claim is the industry’s first multi-channel single-chip FPGA to integrate the entire forward error correction (FEC) and modulation chain for digital broadcast over cable.

The solution is fully compatible with the ITU-T J.83 Annex A, B & C standards adopted in Japan and North America, and the European Digital Video Broadcast - Cable (DVB-C) standard. And it will enable broadcast OEMs to deliver equipment that targets intelligent video networks for “on-the-fly” reconfiguration of bandwidth-on-demand.

The two companies also plan to develop professional modulators/demodulators for the DVB satellite version 2 (DVB-S2) and DVB satellite (DVB-S) standards as well as other cable, terrestrial, and satellite applications before the end of the year.

“The DSP and RAM architectures in Altera’s Stratix II and Cyclone II FPGAs are well suited to our technology because they consistently deliver a higher symbol rate per gate than is possible with other comparable platforms,” said Commsonic director Paul Rudkin.

“For example, we believe that Stratix II FPGAs may be the only cost-effective route to achieve the 300-Mbps throughput target we have set for our FPGA DVB-S2 demodulator.”

Commsonic has already developed single-channel modulators for DVB-C and the COFDM-based DVB terrestrial (DVB-T) standards that are optimised for Stratix II and Cyclone II FPGAs.