A single-chip solution for digital demodulation and forward error correction of DBS signals

Abstract

We present a low-cost single VLSI chip solution for the reception of digitally transmitted compressed video signals. This chip is an integral part of the direct TV direct broadcast satellite (DBS) receiver, and it implements digital demodulation of baseband QPSK signals, and forward error correction using the combination of a Viterbi decoder and a Reed-Solomon decoder. Innovative digital signal processing algorithms were implemented to obtain excellent performance (<0.5 dB from theory) at a low cost.