Digital radio processor for channel demodulation and source decoding of satellite radio programs

New satellite based digital radio standards are offering customers an excellent audio quality and additional digital data services. The comparably small bandwidth requirement for an digital radio channel allows to transmit a bigger number of different programs on the same transponder as it were possible with analog transmission. Such digital transmission techniques however require considerably larger efforts both on the transmission and the receiving side. This includes the use of forward error correction and audio data reduction e.g. MPEG audio. For successful broadcasting services it is essential to provide a low price receiver technology. This paper describes a very cost effective digital radio decoder IC for signals transmitted by the ADR Standard. It is remarkable that both the channel decoding and the audio data decompression is basically done by only one powerful digital signal processor MASC super(2) with an optimized architecture for digital radio processing. It is supported by a special Viterbi decoder module for error correction.