Radioscape breaks out of TI gaol

HAVING PREVIOUSLY supplied its products to the market based on TI's DSPs, mobile TV and digital radio specialist, Radioscape has announced support for the Blackfin BF52x series of processors from Analog Devices.

This approach will enable RadioScape to integrate a DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast) baseband decoder and a audio video decoder onto a single device instead of on two separate chips.

The company's Software Defined Radio (SDR) approach helps speed up product design since a number of multimedia features (like pause, rewind, record and cache service) can be swiftly added. Plus the Blackfin has the ability to be either the system master or a slave coprocessor.

According to Andrew Dewhurst, product manager for receivers with Radioscape, "The radio of the future will increasingly be part of a multi-standard, multi-media device. The challenges of supporting such broad functionality is significantly reduced through the SDR approach."

He added, "We now have a highly portable code base and this gives us the opportunity to engage with other semiconductor partners as we develop our roadmap."

The company's Mobile TV (MTV) receiver solutions are based on the Eureka 147 DAB standard, including the T-DMB and DAB-IP standards which are increasingly being utilised in mobile phones.

DAB-based standards have been adopted for mobile TV in many parts of the world as they use spectrum that is already available in contrast to DVB-H which has issues in many countries including the UK.

Radioscape's approach means that apps such as music downloads, Electronic Programme Guides (EPGs), picture downloads, interactive voting and games, plus user specified feeds such as sport, news, traffic, and weather can be readily added.

Such facilities apply equally to Personal Multimedia Players as well as mobile handsets, Les Sabel, RadioScape's vp of Technology claimed. µ

L'INQ
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