Frontier Silicon and SigmaTel partner to deliver low cost DAB, FM and fully featured MP3 player

Anthony Sethill, CEO of Frontier Silicon, said, “This is a significant new addition for the personal media player (PMP) market, since we can now enable DAB manufacturers to add MP3 functionality, as well as those making MP3 players to add DAB digital radio listening functions on their devices. Until now there wasn’t a readily available platform solution that could be easily customised by manufacturers and quickly deployed into mass production.”

Ron Edgerton, chairman, CEO and president of SigmaTel, added, “Our partnership has worked very well and our technologies complement each other perfectly to provide the market a low cost and compact ready-to-use solution powered by SigmaTel’s market-leading system-on-chip solution and Frontier Silicon’s expertise in delivering DAB radio platforms.”

The Naples FS 2011 module within Atlas 2 is a compact, low-power, high-performance DAB and FM OEM module designed for use in battery-powered products. Naples enables personal DAB digital radio and Internet audio devices, and incorporates Frontier Silicon’s Apollo RF front-end and Chorus DAB baseband processor.

SigmaTel’s STMP3500 portable audio SoCs are highly-integrated, battery-optimised ICs designed to decode compressed audio files such as MP3 files, using high performance audio codec, DSP, USB interface, and general purpose I/O. The SoC solution provides high quality audio playback for portable devices such as MP3 flash players, language learners, and jukeboxes, and enable market-leading benefits like low BOM (bill-of-materials) costs, high speed USB and 50 hours of life on a single AA battery. The SigmaTel SoC also supports MP3 and WMA audio format algorithms as well as security in WMA DRM (digital rights management).

The Atlas 2 platform that combines these two solutions from Frontier Silicon and SigmaTel can be configured to customer requirements, including optional hardware FM, selectable memory size, keyboard and LCD options. The PCB (printed circuit board) can be powered by a lithium ion/polymer battery back, or via a mini-B type-B connector, and provides on-board charging and power management. It features a full MMI interface implemented on either a 1.1 inch single-colour OLED or backlit graphics FSTN display. A separate customisable keyboard PCB provides navigation and short cut keys to menus and functions. The headphone antenna acts as the Band-II (FM) and Band-III antenna. File storage can be to internal Flash or to SD card.