A Hardware/Software Co-Design Case Study on DVB-T Receiver System

Digital Video Broadcasting Terrestrial (DVB-T) is a leading international standard established for the move from Analog to Digital Broadcasting basically via terrestrial networks. Within DVB-T, it is possible to carry defined data containers in addition to the audio and video in the MPEG-2 transport stream. This paper presents a hardware/software co-design method for the implementation of DVB-T receiver system. We present the approach not only for the characteristics of the analysis, but also provide the numerical decision for evaluation of the various approaches. The overall system is first analyzed and profiled with ARM profiler. Then the receiver system is partitioned into software part and hardware part respectively based on the property of analysis. The software part is developed for the implementation of intensive decision making operations needed for the received bitstreams. The hardware part is a dedicated hardware for the regular and computation-intensive operations in channel decoding. The receiver system is realized on the ARM integrator platform where the hardware and software is communicated efficiently with the AMBA architecture.