ginngi engineering

Our customer is a world leader in controlled access consumer video. A PCI board was developed that implements all of the functions of a settop box for interfacing to a standard DVB satellite system for the purpose of extracting video and data for processing in a PC under Windows. In addition to the numerous standard settop boxes it supports from various manufacturers they needed a means to access important data embedded within their satellite transmissions for proprietary use in their system.

The board architecture consisted of a RF tuner front end with Salomon/Viterbi decoders, a standard settop box chip, which provided the interface to the satellite and the extraction of the elementary streams from the DVB transmission, a custom FPGA and a PCI bus bridge chip.

The FPGA accepted the elementary streams as provided by the settop box chip and extracted in real-time the fields of interest. These were then collected in a hardware FIFO and made available to software on the PC via a custom device driver.

The board was laid out in 12 layers.