Product category:
Communications ICs (Wired)
News Release from: Frontier Silicon | Subject: Chorus 2
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 01 September 2006
Baseband enables next DAB generation
A new advanced and highly integrated system-on-chip will enable the next generation of DAB digital radio-based products.
Frontier Silicon has launched a new advanced and highly integrated system-on-chip which will enable the next generation of DAB digital radio-based products The Chorus 2 FS1020 chip is a new programmable DAB baseband receiver providing significant space, cost and power savings on a typical radio or mobile handheld devices
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 8 Jan 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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The chip is now in mass production and products using the chip will appear in the market early 2007.
The key benefit of the new improved Chorus 2 IC is the level of integration - providing up to 40% space savings on the board real-estate and 35% cost savings on the system bill-of-material.
Chorus 2 has 640Kbyte of integrated memory, enabling it to run value added features without requiring external memory.
Further reading
Reference platform cuts the cost of DAB
Quantum is a DAB/CD/FM and optional MP3 reference design which can be easily integrated by manufacturers and developers into a wide range of products including boom boxes, midi and micro systems.
DAB receiver module aims for handset applications
Samsung Electro-Mechanics and Frontier Silicon have co-operated to develop a miniature low power DAB receiver module specifically targeted for integration into mobile phone handsets.
The advanced chip architecture also provides up to 50% power consumption savings compared with other integrated DAB baseband receivers currently available.
The significant increase in processing power available on the chip allows manufacturers to create new convergence products at lower cost than is possible at present.
Typical of the new products that will be enabled with Chorus 2 are DAB radios merged with other audio functionality - such as combined DAB/ FM/ MP3/ WMA/ AAC digital music players, DAB radios with USB 2.0 OTG connectivity for high speed file transfer and firmware upgrade, Internet radios, digital music servers and jukeboxes, and multimedia-enhanced PDAs.
Chorus 2 will supersede the successful Chorus processor found in over 80% of DAB digital radios on the market.
The new baseband receiver covers a number of physical layer standards, particularly those utilising COFDM modulation.
The IC uses a Meta122 CPU with extensive DSP (digital signal processor) capabilities, which is based on a multi-threaded architecture capable of executing multiple DSP tasks on the same core without cross-task interference.
Many of the components which were previously outside the chip are now incorporated on-chip including a switched mode power supply which eliminates the need for external regulators, power-on-reset, digital clock (DCXO) and integrated memory to provide full ensemble 1.8Mbit/s decoding in a Eureka-147 DAB receiver.
The use of a hardware-assisted DSP architecture on the Chorus 2 chip ensures that the DSP has additional capacity to run other embedded applications such as software FM, audio decoders, digital rights management, graphics and audio equalisers.
Unique to Chorus 2 is the integration of peripheral features on-chip, such as the USB 2.0 OTG interface, support for TFT and LCD displays, ATA/ATAPI interface for hard-disk storage and NAND Flash, memory stick and SD interfaces.
Chorus 2 is available now in a package with small footprint of just 13 x 13 x 1.7mm.
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