Italian Team Focuses on Digital Video Broadcasting to Seek Texas Instruments Cash Prize
Imagine turning on the television to see your professor, then reacting to what she says through an interactive digital response system right in the comfort of your own living room. Or, try participating in a game show, going for big prizes, as you buzz in the answers from home. Or, purchase merchandise interactively from a number of stores broadcasting their wares.
Just as each of the 15 nested boxes holding Perugia’s "Virgin’s Wedding Ring" must be opened with a key held by a different person, students from the University of Perugia in Umbria, the "Green Heart of Italy," unlocked a few mysteries to make interactive digital sound and video deliveries possible for more people through Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB). The team of four students already has won $10,000 from Texas Instruments for their work in TI’s Digital Signal Processing (DSP) Solutions Challenge and are continuing in competition for the $100,000 grand prize.
DVB delivers higher and more stable quality broadcasts than Standard Definition TV (SDTV). In addition to digital sound and video, DVB can bring multimedia interactive services to the home, as well as SDTV, and should strengthen the relationship between computers and television.
Working on the Italian team were Euro Sereni, a graduate student, along with Stefano Gai, Alessando Dini and Stefan Pielmier. The latter three were undergraduate telecommunications majors when their entry was submitted. Sereni and Pielmier chose their major because of their interest in digital technology for processing information. However, Dini directly cited the "great employment opportunities" possible in telecommunications, particularly with the explosion of the cellular telephony industry in Italy, as a major factor in his selection of major.
Interest in DVB is not new to the University of Perugia. In fact, in the Electronics Institute, the Telecommunications Group coordinated by Professor Saverio Cacopardi has been active in DVB research for a few years. Fabrizio Frescura, the TI entrants’ advising professor, is a member of this group, which was part of the European Advanced Communication Technology and Services program, CABSINET. Through this program, the DVB-T (Terrestrial DVB) was adopted as the forward link of a two-layer network to provide interactive digital TV and broadband services.
Typically, television receivers vary in their hardware configurations. The characteristics of the communication channel over which these units receive the broadcast also varies. A programmable DSP solution enables these units to provide good quality video across these varying configurations and channel conditions. The students worked with 200 Mhz, 1,600-mips (million instructions per second) fixed point DSPs in a dual processor configuration for receivers in the DVB-T 8k mode.
"The adoption of a 32-bit fixed point architecture leads to a very low implementation loss, allowing it to obtain short processing delays," Frescura said. "This feature is not very significant in broadcast applications, where the watcher passively receives information. Low delay becomes meaningful in interactive, multimedia applications of DVB-T because the user is in the loop, clicking the mouse or other controller and waiting for a response. Shorter time delays are likely to increase the user’s enjoyment and patience with an interactive program.
"From a global point of view, our project is a good starting point to build a DVB-T chipset based on TI’s TMS320C6x DSPs," said Frescura. "In fact, thanks to the adoption of the TMS320C6x DSPS, a very low implementation loss and small processing delay characterize our implementation."
"Even if the performance achieved may suggest applying the proposed configuration to high end applications, the decreasing cost of DSPs will allow its adoption in consumer devices also, particularly for interactive operation of DVB-T," Frescura said. "This means that low-cost `last-mile’ end-user wireless devices could be built using Texas Instruments technology to provide services such as entertainment, healthcare or education to a wide range of residential or mobile users."
The students apparently are looking forward to greater interactivity possible with DVB-T as it becomes more affordable. Sereni and Dini both spend their free time surfing the Internet, while Pielmier likes to read computer and photo magazines. They enjoy sports as well with Dini liking basketball and Pielmier cycling the rolling hills, woods and valleys of the Umbria region of Italy.
What will they do with the knowledge gained from this project? Without hesitation, they all plan to get jobs using DSP designs. As Dini said: "I consider this experience a starting point for my expertise in technical design by DSPs."
Pielmier said: "My experience at the University of Perugia during the TI Challenge project was appreciated for my actual employment in a telecommunication industry where it will be useful for the future."
Frescura, the advising professor, was born in Perugia in 1966, received his degree in electronic engineering from the University of Perugia in 1992 and his doctorate in 1997. He has been involved in personal communication techniques, modulation and coding. His current research is the combined spread spectrum, Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique, an algorithm applied to wireless LANS and OFDM techniques for digital audio and video broadcasting. He is a member of the IEEE Communications, Consumer Electronics and Computer Societies.
TI's DSP Solutions Challenge is a worldwide competition to develop the most innovative and functional design using TI DSPs. Created to address the industry-wide shortage of design engineers with DSP experience, TI has developed and invested in this international recognition system to encourage research and interest in the technology.
The DSP market is growing at an average annual rate of 30%, according to the market research firm Forward Concepts. Today's DSP solutions market is roughly $5 billion and has grown more than 40% per year since 1988. This market growth projection exceeds that of the semiconductor industry in general.
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