Hertfordshire-based Frontier Silicon has upgraded its popular Venice DAB receiver module to handle DAB+

"There is enough processing power on the Kino 2 to allow us to do DAB+," Frontier v-p sales and marketing Steve Evans told Electronics Weekly. "We did have to add more memory and the additional firmware."

Kino 2 (pictured) is the firm's DAB baseband processor chip, used in its existing Venice 5.0 receiver module.

The new module, dubbed Venice 5.1, has been released at the same time as the Australian Broadcasting Summit in Sydney where Australia's DAB+ roll-out will be discussed.

"The availability of a good range of receivers is a pre-requisite for the successful launch of DAB+," said Frontier CEO Anthony Sethill. "We have taken the strategic decision to develop the Venice 5.1 module so that our customers are ready to supply digital radios during the second half of 2008 as the Australian market develops."

The firm claims to have over 50 DAB receiver design-ins with Venice 5.0 DAB receiver. "We shipped 2.2 million units in 2007," said v-p sales Evans. "We don't have exact world figures, but we do know UK consumers bought two million DAB receivers last year."

Venice 5.1 can be used as either the main controller in a tabletop or clock radio, or as a serially-controlled slave in a micro Hi-Fi or other audio system. The module supports DAB+/DAB and also FM-RDS.

DAB+ uses AAC compression to get equal audio quality from half the data bandwidth required by DAB - which affectively uses MP2 compression.

There are no plans to introduce DAB+ to the UK - the best developed DAB market in the world - as DAB+ is not backwards-compatible with the large number of existing DAB receivers.

However DAB+ is seen by some as the only commercially-viable way to introduce terrestrial digital audio broadcasting into countries with analogue-only audio broadcast.