Technology

There is a large scale proliferation of wireless standards in the consumer markets. This has led to feature rich consumer devices capable of sourcing content (audio, video and data) from a wide variety of sources. The IC's in these devices perform complex signal processing tasks needing high computational power. The IC in these devices have three broad categories of architectures namely hardwired architectures, General purpose DSP and Application Specific Signal Processors (ASSP)

Hardwired Architectures: Traditionally ICs have been typically implemented as hardwired architectures due to the inherent compute complexity of the tasks. Although, hardwired architectures are ideally suited for point solutions, they have the following major disadvantages:

  • Inflexibility: The architecture does not scale with addition of new features or standards. Receivers perform complex signal processing algorithms that need to be adaptive. Any minor changes force an expensive silicon re-spin.

  • Cost: As the number of standards to be supported increase hardwired architectures need more 'silicon real estate'. This results in higher recurring costs.

  • Limited Reuse: Moving hardware implementation blocks across product lines is difficult and expensive.

DSP Architectures: A general purpose programmable DSP can be an alternative to hardwired architectures. However a general purpose DSP is targeted for a wide range of applications like MPEG decoding, graphics and others. This leads to a solution that is prohibitively expensive for consumer applications.

ASSP (Application Specific Signal Processor) Based Architectures: The hard-wired architectures and general purpose DSP are two ends of the spectrum. The benefits of both the hardwired architecture and the DSP can be met by an architecture based on ASSPs. These ASSPs are designed specifically to solve a class of signal processing problems in an application.

Figure: Cost Vs. flexibility for different architectures.

The Saankhya solution is an ASSP for demodulation. It is designed to demodulate all the broadcast TV standards. It is a powerful platform which is capable of supporting world-wide TV demodulation standards in a cost-effective way. It is capable of performing the functions of Signal Conditioning, Signal Processing and Channel Decoding stages to generate a Transport Stream.

The figure below depicts the typical components of Saankhya's universal DTV solution.

The salient features of the platform are the following.

  • Scalability: The combination of a control processor, VLIW based processing clusters constitutes a scalable, high performance, power-efficient platform. The framework of the platform allows each processing cluster to be scaled based on standard specific data rates. This ability also enables us to support wide range of data rates (Cable, Terrestrial). In future this platform will be capable of accommodating emerging DTV standards like DVBT2 and Enhanced VSB for ATSC.

  • Flexibility/Ease of Re-use: The platform enables us to meet performance of all supported standards, by re-using the available MIPS and memory within each of the signal processing clusters. The flexibility of a programmable platform allows us to perform innovative load-balancing.

If you would like to know more about our technology or our product suite then please write to us at info@saankhyalabs.com