BBC broadcasts digital plans with LSI decoder BBC reveals plans to go digital via LSI Logic single-chip decoder in 1998. Jon Mainwaring. LSI Logic has teamed up with the BBC to develop a single-chip digital terrestrial TV (DTT) decoder ready for when broadcasting begins in mid-1998. The BBC, which has already developed a prototype DTT receiver, albeit a bulky one, has partnered with LSI to ensure that viewers can buy set top boxes (STBs) by next summer, since its charter requires that its services are available nationwide. "We believe that no one delivery means is going to dominate the digital age," said Ian Jenkins, controller of new technologies at the BBC. "But it's only through digital terrestrial television that we will achieve the finest coverage of the UK." LSI Logic will be transferring the BBC's prototype receiver, developed while the corporation was helping to set the European Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial (DVB-T) standard, onto a single chip (called the L64780) using its CoreWare design programme. "Our task is to take their wall of hardware and put it on one chip," said Wilf Corrigan, chairman and CEO of LSI Logic. Other companies are independently developing chipsets for DTT, and also expect to have them ready for next summer. These include Motorola, SGS-Thomson Microelectronics and Hyundai. "We'll be sampling our chipset [consisting of three devices] by the end of July," said David Jones, Motorola's marketing development manager for STBs, who insists it will be in full production by November, with a one chip solution sampling in March next year. SGS-Thomson Microelectronics will also have a chipset, consisting of four devices, available this July, and hopes to reduce this to two chips by next summer. "Certainly, we will have a chipset available by then," said Jean-Pierre Lusinchi, general manager of SGS-Thomson's Video Division. DTT technology at a glance
The DVB-T standard uses a modulation and coding scheme known as coded orthogonal frequency division multiplex (C-OFDM) OFDM modulation spreads the transmitted bit stream over a large number of carriers (2000 in the UK) Each carrier is individually modulated in a conventional quadrature-amplitude modulation (QAM) format All carriers are modulated and generated simultaneously using a Fast Fourier Transform processor