2001: Queen's Award for the Digital TV chip (joint with LSI Logic)

Peter Bury of BBC R&D receives the Queen's Award for Enterprise from Sarah Goad, the Lord Lieutenant of Surrey.

BBC Research & Development and LSI Logic, a leading designer and manufacturer of communications and storage semiconductors, have received the highly prestigious Queen's Award for Industry in the category of Innovation for a jointly developed single-chip digital terrestrial television (DTT) demodulator.

The L64780 receiver chip - the first chip in LSI Logic's family of highly integrated, high performance solutions for digital terrestrial TV broadcast - makes it possible for viewers to receive cutting edge new digital services through their existing television sets. Affordable and effective, it quickly became a market leader when it was launched three years ago.

New digital technology enables transmission of up to 30 channels, in place of the traditional five, along with new interactive communications and services for the partially sighted or hard of hearing.

The BBC and LSI Logic collaboration is at the core of digital innovation and the Queen's Award is recognition of its outstanding contribution. Under the collaboration, BBC R&D provides its intellectual property while LSI Logic adds its integrated circuit design, production and marketing expertise to the project.

Dr Peter Bury, Head of BBC R&D, said: "We are delighted that the commercial success and technological innovation of our partnership with LSI Logic has been recognised with such a prestigious award."

Kenroy Francis, Marketing Director LSI Logic Europe, said: "BBC R&D's expertise has been fundamental to the successful launch and take-up of digital terrestrial television. The superiority of this chip over other solutions enabled set-top box manufacturers and broadcasters to offer digital terrestrial television equipment and services with confidence."

L-R: Justin Mitchell, Jon Stott and Oliver Haffenden.

Justin Mitchell, BBC project leader for the collaboration, added: "The possibilities for the future created by this chip are tremendously exciting. Broadcasters can now offer the services that the consumers want - more choice, higher quality pictures and advanced interactive services."

The LSI Logic family of single-chip COFDM (Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) demodulators is fully compliant with the European Digital Video Broadcast Terrestrial (DVB-T) standard of which the BBC and LSI Logic are members. The DVB-T standard is suitable for the 6, 7 and 8 MHz channels used in different parts of the world. In addition, the chips seamlessly interface with low cost tuners owing to the incorporation of common phase error measurement and compensation algorithms on chip.

Further information about the L64780 and L64781 chips.