Releases > 2005 >

Automotive DAB market gets a boost with successful road trials and three new design wins for Frontier Silicon

London, 11th April 2005: Frontier Silicon - the leading fabless manufacturer of semiconductors for mobile digital television and DAB digital radio products - has announced that three first tier automotive manufacturers have selected its Roadster automotive DAB module for integration into car audio and telematics systems, and at the same time the company - in conjunction with a number of its customers - has successfully completed road trials in Central Europe using the module. The first European car using Frontier Silicon’s Roadster module is scheduled to roll off the production line at the end of 2005.

The Roadster module, launched last year, is based on the market leading and award winning DAB technology already in use in over 70 percent of DAB radios on the market today. The module allows OEM (original equipment manufacturer) fitting of DAB into integrated head units in the car, enabling the normal benefits of DAB such as excellent audio performance and wide choice of services. In addition it supports telematics features such as Traffic Message Channel (TMC), TPEG and other emerging traffic data services at the full DAB decode rate. It is a vertically mounted, fully shielded, self-contained complete system module featuring Eureka 147 DAB receiver, dual band (Band III and L-band) high performance RF front end, base band processor, power supply, flash memory for program and data storage, additional random access memory and a full suite of firmware. Roadster operates from a single 3.3V supply consuming just 800mW while decoding DAB, and also includes a phantom antenna power supply to support active antenna arrangements. The module measures only 55mm x 37mm x 13mm to mount inside a 1DIN radio/CD player.

Steve Evans, VP sales, Frontier Silicon, said, "The automotive infotainment market is an exciting area and a natural extension of the consumer DAB radio market which we have successfully helped to grow over the last three years. The key factors that enabled our Roadster module to be successful in winning the design slots with these manufacturers are its RF performance, power consumption and small size as well as the robust and feature-rich firmware that we are able to supply alongside the module. The ability to support TMC on the module was also considered an advantage." He added, "We are looking forward to seeing the first production cars later this year with DAB functionality enabled by the Roadster module."

Ends

Editor's notes: About Frontier Silicon

Frontier Silicon is an award-winning company at the forefront of the digital multimedia revolution with a range of semiconductor solutions for mobile digital television, digital TV and digital radio.

The company develops and delivers both the broadcast signal receiver modules and digital processing circuits as individual chips and complete system modules to leading consumer electronics and mobile phone brands.

As a fabless semiconductor business, Frontier Silicon's core products include complete DAB modules, DVB-T solutions, DMB (digital multimedia broadcasting) solutions, and the underlying system-on-chip (SoC) devices and receiver chips.

Key customers for the company's products include consumer electronic, automotive entertainment and PDA/mobile phone manufacturers such as Bang & Olufsen, Cambridge Audio, Goodmans, Grundig, Hitachi, Ministry of Sound, Philips, PURE Digital, Roberts Radio, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and TEAC. Frontier Silicon has won a number of awards and its products have also enabled award-winning consumer products. The company's awards include the Fabless Semiconductor Association's start-up to watch award, PricewaterhouseCoopers hottest technology company of 2004 award, the World Economic Forum's technology pioneers to watch 2005, and the Tornado T100 award for one of the best-performing and innovative high-tech private companies.