A FPGA-based instrument for power measurement in DVB-T systems

This paper deals with the implementation of an innovative measurement instrument for power measurement in Digital Video Broadcasting Terrestrial (DVB-T) systems.In previous researches the authors have designed and tuned the measurement method. It is based on a digital signal processing section, which properly estimates the power spectrum density (PSD) of the input DVB-T signal. The peculiarities of the selected measurement algorithm have suggested the development of the instrument on a suitable FPGA platform.In this paper the hardware and the software architectures of an innovative instrument implementing the cited method are proposed. It is characterized by high transportability and exhibits metrological performance comparable with that peculiar to state-of-the-art. In particular, both the firmware solutions and optimizations, proposed to limit the resource demanding and making use of the massive parallelism offered by the FPGA architecture, are described in detail.A number of experimental tests carried out on actual DVB-T signals are also presented, whose results show the good metrological performance of the realized instrument. All measurement results concur with those provided by competitive commercial solutions.

► The instrument is based on a DSP method estimating the PSD of the input signal. ► The proposed instrument architecture allows obtaining high transportability. ► Ad hoc firmware solutions are proposed to optimize the hardware required resources. ► The optimized firmware exploits the massive parallelism offered by the FPGA architecture. ► It exhibits metrological performance comparable with that peculiar to state-of-the-art.