Abstract-A flexible transport stream processor for DTV which is also designed under cost-effective consideration is proposed in this paper. A RISC micro-controller is allocated as the core of transport stream processor for flexibly extending or changing the functions of the transport stream processor. For the consideration of cost-effective design, the functions of the transport stream processor are partitioned into ones which are suitable for hardware implementation and the others suitable for the software executed by the micro-controller. Special enhancement of the instruction set of the micro-controller is proposed, with which the code efficiency of bit-level data-field processing could be improved. A general parsing engine for parsing grouping data-fields is also proposed. With the features described above, about 50% of total cost of transport stream processor with baseline functions can be saved.