A processor core which can run all the world's digital broadcasting standards has been produced by the custom processor company Tensilica, and it has been designed into SOCs by five out of the top ten semiconductor companies.
"The problem was how to build one platform to address all geographies," Tensilica's founder and CTO, Chris Rowen, told the Globalpress Summit Conference in San Francisco yesterday, "Tensilica's HiFi platform is the only platform which can run all the digital broadcasting standards."
The DRM decoder on Tensilica's HiFi 2 audio DSP is based on software developed by Dolby, and the implementation has been certified by Dolby. It has support for DAB, DAB+, HD Radio and XM Radio.
DRM delivers FM-comparable sound quality on frequencies below 30MHz. By using digital audio compression, rather than amplitude modulation techniques, it can fit more signals, with higher quality, into a given amount of spectrum
Asked by Electronics Weekly if this would reduce the big bugbear of digital radio receivers - the power consumption, Rowen replied, "Absolutely. One reason why HiFi has been widely adopted is because it runs at lower clock frequencies than other standards."
Tensilica, with its customers and partners have ported over 50 software packages to the HiFi 2 audio DSP.
Regulators in India and Russia have recently mandated DRM because of its wider geographic coverage in the sub-30MHz band.
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