
1999 March 01
36
Philips Semiconductors
Product specication
Single chip DVB-C channel receiver
VES1820X
OUTPUT SIGNAL QUALITY MEASUREMENTS (BER)
The VES1820X provides an alternative signal quality measurement based on demodulator output Bit Error Rate
computations (BER). This algorithm uses information provided by the Reed-Solomon decoder as shown in FIGURE
17. This information includes:
-
The MFSTART signal which permits determining the number of bits. One Multi-Frame corresponds to 8 x 204
x 8 = 13,056 bits.
-
The correction frame, CORR_FRAME, which corresponds to the number of erroneous bits in a frame at the
Reed-Solomon decoder input (.ie the demodulator decoder output). The maximum value of CORR_FRAME is
64 (that is 8 bytes with 8 erroneous bits each).
-
The uncorrectable block flag, UNCOR which, when set, is counted as 27 erroneous bits (.ie, 9 erroneous
bytes with three corrupted bits per byte).
The multi-frame counter is 14 bits wide and has a range of 0 to 16383. The maximum number of multiframes is
programmable via I2C interface. The Error counter is 20 bits wide.
Depending on the programmation of PVBER, the BER is in the range from 10
-2 to 10-5 (PVBER = 0
16) and can reach
a precision of 10
-8 (PVBER = 3
16).
The following table shows the number of bits of the sequence as a function of PVBER :
PVBER[1:0]
Number of bits
00
10
5
01
10
6
10
7
11
10
8
The error rate information may be obtained by reading the appropriate registers of the I2C interface (index 13, 14 &
15).
FIGURE 17 : OUTPUT SIGNAL QUALITY MEASUREMENT DETERMINATION
CORR_FRAME
UNCOR
7
MFSTART
SYMBOL
COUNTER
Max_MultiFrame ?
=
LATCH
LOOK UP
TABLE
ERROR
COUNTER
REED_SOLOMON
DECODER
BLOCK
20
14
reset
load
2
VBER[19:0]
BER[1:0]