Patent ID: 7289765

Claim:
A demodulator for demodulating an orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) signal whose unit of transmission is a transmission symbol including effective symbols generated by performing time division of an information series and having modulating the information into a plurality of sub-carriers and a guard interval generated by copying a signal waveform of a part of the effective symbols, the demodulator comprising: a reference time generating circuit for generating a reference time based on a reference clock signal; a Fourier transform circuit for extracting a complex signal modulated in each sub-carrier of the transmission symbol by extracting signal areas corresponding to the number of the plurality of sub-carriers for the effective symbols of the OFDM signal sampled with the reference clock signal and performing a Fourier transform of the extracted signal areas; a guard correlation peak time detecting circuit for detecting a timing in which an autocorrelation of the guard interval portion of the OFDM signal attains a peak and for generating a peak time synchronous with the reference time; a symbol-boundary time estimating circuit for estimating, based on the peak time, a symbol-boundary time that is a boundary time of the transmission symbol synchronous with the reference time; a timing control circuit for controlling a timing position where the complex signal is extracted by the Fourier transform circuit based on the symbol-boundary time representing a precision of the reference clock signal cycle; and a phase correcting circuit for calculating a phase-correction amount based on the symbol-boundary time representing a precision smaller than the reference clock signal cycle and making, based on the calculated phase-correction amount, phase correction of the complex signal having been modulated in each of the plurality of sub-carriers and extracted by the Fourier transform circuit.