Electronics Weekly
The Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) organisation and the introduction of the DVB-S specification, which occurred 10 years ago, is used globally by satellite operators for TV broadcasting and data transmission. ST has been closely involved with the DVB technical groups working to optimize the DVB-S2 specification.
ST and the DVB hope DVB-S2 can provide the best transmission performance, along with total system flexibility and reasonable complexity in the receiver. With the DVB-S2 specification, the groups believe the number of standard or High Definition TV (HDTV) channels that can be broadcast in a conventional transponder will increase and the price of satellite capacity will decrease.
The organisations also said the DVB-S2 specification benefits from recent developments in channel coding and modulation, and provides 30 per cent more capacity than DVB-S. They even claim this may be the end-all specification as the capacity is so close to the theoretical performance limit, the so-called “Shannon Limit”.
“By so nearly approaching the Shannon Limit, manufacturers can be certain that the investment they make now in implementing DVB-S2 will not have to be repeated. Consumers, too, can be confident that they will not have to replace their receivers to take advantage of new modulation schemes,” said Christos Lagomichos, general manager of ST’s set-top box division.
