Frontier Silicon partners with other industry leaders to deliver world's first range of DAB+ radios

Live DAB+ demonstration on the Factum Electronics stand at IBC, Amsterdam

LONDON -- 30 August, 2007 -- Market-leading DAB technology company, Frontier Silicon, and Fraunhofer IIS, worldwide experts in audio coding, have teamed up with tier one audio manufacturers to deliver the world’s first 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.   Demonstrations of the solution can be seen at the IBC exhibition in Amsterdam receiving a live DAB+ broadcast from Factum Electronics, but unlike previous engineering demonstrators, this will be the first time end-user DAB+ radios will be shown working.

Steve Evans, VP Sales and Marketing, Frontier Silicon said: “As DAB+ is being adopted by an increasing number of broadcasters worldwide, we are pleased to announce that our DAB+ solution is being integrated into a variety of audio products, including table top, clock radio, battery powered and WiFi enabled radios.  While DAB+ is not required for established markets such as the UK and Denmark, this development will help to accelerate the global adoption of digital radio.”

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 uniqueness of the Frontier Silicon DAB+ solution lies in its 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) is achieving great success in the UK and Denmark, with over 5½ million units shipped to date and growing at a rate of 12% year on year in the UK alone.  However, countries that have yet to roll out DAB are now looking to use DAB+ which utilizes 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.

About Fraunhofer IIS

Founded in 1985, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen, with its 480 staff members, ranks first in employees and revenues among the Fraunhofer Institutes. Fraunhofer IIS has achieved worldwide recognition for the development of the audio coding method mp3.  
Fraunhofer IIS provides research services on a contract basis and licenses technology in the areas of audio and video source coding, multimedia realtime systems, digital radio broadcasting and digital cinema systems, integrated circuits and sensor systems, design automation, wireless, wired and optical networks, localization and navigation, imaging systems and nanofocus X-ray technology, high-speed cameras, medical sensor solutions, and communications technology in transport and logistics. 
Its budget of 58 million Euro is financed primarily by projects from industry and public institutions, with less than 20 percent subsidized by state and federal funds.
For more information visit www.iis.fraunhofer.de.

About Factum Electronics AB and Effnet Holding AB (publ)

Factum Electronics AB, a wholly owned subsidiary of Effnet Holding AB (publ), is a world leader in the areas of DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting), DAB+, DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) and NICAM, digital stereo sound for television broadcasting. Factum Electronics develops and sells system solutions for signal encoding, decoding and processing and serves professional broadcasting customers in more than 40 countries. Additionally Factum Electronics develops and sells middleware for receiver chip manufacturers and test & monitoring equipment. For more information about Factum, please visit www.factum.se and more information about DAB/DMB is available at www.worlddab.org.

About Frontier Silicon Limited

Frontier Silicon is the leading supplier of digital and RF integrated circuits and modules for mobile digital TV and digital audio products.  Established in 2001 as a privately funded fabless semiconductor company, it has over 200 employees and is headquartered in Watford, England, with design centres in Cambridge and Dublin, and branch offices and technical support representatives in Hong Kong, China, Korea and Japan.  Products include audio processors for digital radio and network streaming, and receiver solutions for mobile TV, supporting multiple broadcast standards including DVB-H, DVB-T, T-DMB and DAB-IP.
Customers include Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Bang & Olufsen, Bush, Denon, Goodmans, Grundig, Hitachi, JVC, Onkyo, Philips, PURE Digital, ROBERTS, Sanyo, TEAC and Yamaha.
For more information, visit www.frontier-silicon.com.