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“Verona 2 power is 80-100mW decoding for DAB reception, Verona 1 was 200-220mW,” Frontier v-p corporate development Patrick Hannon told Electronics Weekly. “Hibernate is 1mW. Verona 1 was 50mW in stand-by, there is no hibernate mode.”
At the centre of the module is Frontier’s Kino 4 chip which the firm spent £12m developing – the original Verona was Kino 3.
Frontier claims Kino 4 is the first chip for digital broadcast reception which integrates RF, baseband for DAB, DAB+ and FM, a microcontroller, audio decode and digital to analogue conversion on a single piece of silicon. Both digital and analogue audio outputs are included.
Band II/III is covered, and optionally L-band, with typically -100dBm DAB/DAB+ sensitivity and -108dBm FM sensitivity.
The microcontroller can manage an alphanumeric display, buttons, audio amplifiers and a Bluetooth module. Software is configured to customer requirements and pre-installed in the module’s flash memory – which can be specified at different sizes.
More work is planned around Kino 4. “In the near future, customers will be able to develop products for non-DAB/DAB+ regions, for example HD Radio in the US, based on the same design,” said Frontier, adding that Kino 4 is expected to find its way into DAB adapters for cars over the next 18 months.
At 43.4x34mm (14.7cm2), the Verona 2 module is slightly larger than the first Verona (48x28mm = 13.4cm2), and is “20% lower cost than Verona 1”, said Hannon.
Among available reference designs available for Verona 2 is the Venus Dock Radio – a ‘Digital Tick’ and WorldDMB Profile 1-compliant entry level receiver for DAB, DAB+, DMB-Radio and FM-RDS, built around the module running the firm’s DAB 6.x embedded software.
All this, and it had a phone dock. “Venus Dock Radio provides a simple route to enable OEMs to produce iOS docking systems offering DAB radio, FM radio and wired docking,” saod Frontier.
Included are: specifications, schematics, gerbers, bill-of-materials and software.
Venice 2 interfaces
- 12Mbit/s USB 2.0
- Supports Apple Lightning iAP2 in host mode, and Android JellyBean 4.x, docking
- UART/SCB (I2C compatible) control interface
- Analogue audio output
- Digital audio output – I2S or S/PDIF
- SSI (SPI compatible) and SCB (I2C compatible) interfaces
- Keypad and rotary encoder support
- Infrared remote control
- General purpose I/O (GPIO)
- Multi-purpose ADCs and PDM/PWM out
- F-Type antenna connector option
