Frontier Silicon has launched a programmable DAB digital radio baseband receiver which it claims will half power consumption for use in mobile handheld devices.

The chip is in production and products using the chip will appear in the market early 2007, said the company.

Called Chorus 2, the IC has 640kbyte of memory, which should reduce the need for external memory.  The company expects the device to be used in multi-function radios incorporating DAB/ FM/ MP3/ WMA/ AAC digital music players and DAB radios with a USB 2.0 interface.

The baseband receiver covers a number of physical layer standards, particularly those utilizing COFDM modulation. The IC uses a Meta122 CPU with extensive DSP (digital signal processor) capabilities, which is based on a multi-threaded architecture capable of executing multiple DSP tasks on the same core without cross-task interference.

An on-chip switched mode power supply reduces the need for external regulators and memory provides full ensemble 1.8Mbit/s decoding in a Eureka-147 DAB receiver.

Chorus 2 is available in a package with a footprint of 13x13x1.7mm.