Hertfordshire-based Frontier Silicon has halved the power of DAB decoding with the introduction of its Venice 7 module.
A hardware and software drop-in replacement for its existing Venice 5 product, the latest version uses a new baseband IC, Kino3, made on a finer geometry process, thought to be 65nm. “That is a reasonably good guess,” marketing director Mark Hopgood told EW.
“For commercial reasons”, Hopgood would not reveal the power consumption of either module.
Venice 7 has sufficient on-chip SDRAM to decode World DMB’s Profile 1 specification which includes DAB, DAB+ and DVB-A; as well as FM.
Venice 5 could only handle DAB+ and DVB-A in its 5.1 incarnation, which has added off-chip SDRAM.
Comment: It would be mad not to back DAB+
In the same week, Frontier announced an Internet radio module: Venice 6.2.
This adds anti-hack hardware to the earlier Venice 6 Internet radio module to allow radio OEMs to get DRM (digital rights management) approval for their products.