Frontier Silicon and Fraunhofer IIS have teamed up with tier one audio manufacturers to deliver a range of DAB+ radios. Solutions incorporating Frontier Silicon's multi-standard digital radio SoC Chorus 2 with Fraunhofer's audio decoder IP are being designed into products from specialist brands including Bush, Grundig, Magicbox, Ministry of Sound, Pure, Revo, Tivoli and others, which will be available in shops by the end of this year.
Manufacturers designing DAB+ radios today are using a variety of solutions from Frontier Silicon including the Chorus 2 chip, Venice 6 multistandard (DAB+/DAB/FM/WiFi) module, and the Jupiter 6 production-ready reference platform. The Frontier Silicon DAB+ solution comprises hardware-assisted DSP core architecture, which coupled with Fraunhofer's efficient MPEG-4 HE-AAC v2 audio IP, enables complex broadcast streams to be decoded while keeping power consumption low.
DAB (based on MPEG 1 layer II) has achieved success in the UK and Denmark. However, countries that have yet to roll out DAB are now looking to use DAB+ which utilises the more efficient MPEG-4 HE AAC v2 codec, enabling a greater number of radio channels to be broadcast within a set radio spectrum. Australia has officially committed to transmit DAB+ in 2009 and many other countries including Canada, Italy, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Malta, Israel, Hungary, Kuwait, Malaysia, and New Zealand are expected to follow suit soon.
