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New addition to world’s most successful Venice DAB modules enables electronic programme guide and personal video recorder like capability for digital radio

London (PRWEB) June 1, 2005 -- Frontier Silicon – the leading fabless manufacturer of semiconductors for mobile digital television and DAB digital radio products – has launched a significant new capability that will bring personal-video-recorder (PVR) like capabilities to digital radio. The company has introduced DABplus, a combination of a sophisticated advanced electronic programme guide (EPG) and advanced recording and timer capabilities for its highly successful Venice module to transform the personal listening experience of DAB digital radio. The Chorus processor at the heart of this module has fuelled the current digital radio expansion and has now shipped over two million devices.

Anthony Sethill, CEO of Frontier Silicon, said, “DABplus adds a totally new dimension to DAB digital radio, bringing a whole new personal listening experience to the consumer. Users can bring up seven days of programmes, select what they want to listen to or record, and use any number of timers to record their favourite programmes onto a memory card for playback on the same radio or any other compatible audio player. This will revolutionise digital radio just as PVR has revolutionised the television viewing experience.”

The Venice module allows manufactures to quickly bring a DAB digital radio to market, since it contains all necessary components and requires only power source, antenna, display and keypad to be added for a fully featured product. The addition of DABplus provides users of DAB digital radios with access to programme information and a range of features such as genre browsing, timer-set recording and a rich set of alarm features. Frontier Silicon’s software provides an interface through which EPG and dynamic service information (DLS) can be viewed. DABplus includes scrolling text for lines that extend beyond the 16-character screen width, enabling a rich user interface to be implemented.

Anthony Sethill adds, “The addition of DABplus to our market leading modules will help accelerate the adoption of new broadcast features such as EPG and is therefore an important next step for the digital radio market.” He says, “Our engineering team and strategic partners have been working on the Eureka 147 standard for over 10 years – longer than any other group – and have in excess of 100 man years of experience in perfecting the silicon and protocol stacks. In this process we have been instrumental in assisting broadcasters like the BBC and DigitalOne with the rollout of DAB digital radio services, with our chips and modules at the heart of over 70 percent of DAB digital radios on the market.”

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. For more information visit www.frontier-silicon.com

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Source :  http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/6/prweb246280.htm