This paper presents fully digital high speed (17.6Mb/s) burst modem for Offset Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (OQPSK), which employs novel digital modem VLSICs. The modulator VLSIC directly generates modulated intermediate frequency (IF) signals in a fully digitalized manner. A newly proposed digital reverse-modulation and pre-filtered carrier filter-limiter scheme realizes low power consumption and stable operation in a low Eb/No condition. The demodulator VLSIC also achieves fast bit-timing acquisition in burst mode. Moreover, it supports stable initial burst acquisition by a novel automatic frequency control (AFC) acquisition detector and a digital burst detector. A digital burst automatic gain control (AGC) compensates burst-to-burst level differences without analog circutits. Performance evaluation results show that the new modem achieves satisfactory bit-error-rate performance in severe environments. The developed modem has been employed in a commercial portable earth station for ISDN services and reduces the hardware size to one third that of the conventional one.

An Ultra-high-speed (higher than 60 MHz) Viterbi decoder VLSIC with coding rates from one-half to fifteen-sixteenth and a constraint length of seven for forward error correction (FEC) has been developed using 0.8-µm semicustom CMOS LSIC technology and a newly developed high-speed ACS circuit. To reduce power consumption of the one-chip Viterbi decoder, a universal-coding-rate scarce-state-transition (SST) Viterbi decoding scheme and low-power-consumption burst-mode-selection (BMS) path memory have been proposed and employed to the developed VLSIC. In addition, a new maximum-likelihood-decision (MLD) circuit for the SST Viterbi decoder has been developed. The total power consumption of the developed chip is reduced to 75% of the conventional one and the developed Viterbi decodar VLSIC achieves a maximum operation speed of 60 MHz. It achieves near theoretical net coding-gain performance for various coding rates.