Mirics, the developer of software-based TV receivers, has designed a version of its DAB and DAB+ digital radio receivers to run on ARM Cortex processors. The UK-based firm has its eye firmly on the smartphone and tablet PC markets.
The firm is a big advocate of the Cortex-A9 processor.
“The figures on the ARM platform are very impressive, with the demodulator taking less than 8% of a 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A9," said Simon Atkinson, president of Mirics.
“Taking our existing DAB+ product to the ARM Cortex architecture was the next step in our on-going CPU migration,” said Atkinson.
According to Lance Howarth, executive v-p of marketing at ARM, the Mirics port is an important demonstration of software TV running on its processors.
"It demonstrates that the Neon media processing engine, which is an integral part of all ARM Cortex-A series processors including the Cortex-A15 and recently announced Cortex-A7 processors, is capable of enabling a range of multimedia and signal processing features, including software TV and radio, on the latest generation of mobile computing devices.”
DAB+ is an extension of DAB – it uses the same physical layer but encodes the audio using AAC giving the consumer improved reception. In addition its higher compression ratio can provide broadcasts either more channels at equivalent quality or frees up space for program associated data services.
Mirics expects DAB and DAB+ solutions will be demonstrated on smartphones next year.
www.mirics.com