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Frontier Silicon DAB sales top 5 million units

DAB+ stimulating new markets

London, 12 October, 2007:  Frontier Silicon today announced that it has shipped over 5 million DAB ICs and modules, highlighting its continued leading position in digital audio with a DAB receiver market share of over 75%. Frontier’s success has been achieved after just five years of operation and with the new DAB+ standard opening new markets for digital radios around the world, Frontier expects DAB/DAB+ exponential growth over the next five years.

The UK DAB industry, which now boasts a listening base of nearly one in five of the adult population, has accounted for a significant portion of these sales, with Denmark, Norway Germany, Belgium and Switzerland contributing the rest. With the recent availability of the new DAB+ standard, several new countries are expected to fully adopt DAB/DAB+ in the coming years. Australia is launching its digital audio services at the end of next year and many other countries are expected to follow suit soon, including Italy, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Malta, Israel, Hungary, Kuwait, Malaysia, and New Zealand, heralding a worldwide move to digital radio based on the Eureka-147 DAB standard.

“We are very happy to announce the shipment of our 5 millionth DAB solution today and I would like to thank all of our customers and suppliers for helping us reach this important milestone for our company,” said Anthony Sethill, CEO Frontier Silicon. “With the positive reaction in the broadcaster community to the announcement of the DAB+ standard, we are very excited about the prospects for DAB/DAB+ radios and we expect to see significant expansion in this industry over the coming years”.

Although only five years old, Frontier Silicon has amassed a powerful portfolio of digital audio products with a current line up including a multistandard module incorporating DAB+/DAB, Wi-Fi and music streaming (Venice 6), and a low-cost module for mass market DAB radios (Venice 5).  All Frontier modules are based on the company’s optimized Chorus 2 and Kino 2 broadcast receiver ICs and have associated platforms to enable rapid time-to-market (the Jupiter, Mercury and Quantum ranges).  The latest platforms also feature iPod® docking capability, which is fast becoming a ‘must-have’ in new radio designs.

Editor's notes

About digital broadcasting

DAB    Digital Radio standard Eureka-147 using MPEG Audio Layer 2 as standard audio codec.
DMB    DAB based application for mobile TV.
DAB+  Digital Radio DAB using MPEG-4 HE-AAC v2 as audio codec.

Trademarks

Apple, the Apple logo, iPod and iTunes are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.  Frontier Silicon uses Meta™ and UCC™ intellectual property from Imagination Technologies. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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