STMicroelectronics, in cooperation with Kenwood and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (Fraunhofer IIS), presented a fully working prototype of a “Digital Radio Mondiale” (DRM) receiver at last week’s IFA Consumer Electronics trade fair in Berlin. The prototype could pave the way to the development of a low-power Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) for DRM applications such as fixed and portable radios, car receivers, software receivers, and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).
Standardized by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), Digital Radio Mondiale is a universal, open standard digital radio system with FM-like sound quality available to markets worldwide for long-wave (LW), medium-wave (MW), and short-wave (SW) frequencies. In addition to providing substantially better audio quality and interference-free reception, the DRM system benefits listeners with new multimedia content such as track title, artist, and station name, which can be displayed on DRM receivers to enhance the listening experience.
Unlike digital radio systems that require a new frequency allocation, DRM just uses more efficiently the existing Amplitude Modulation (AM) broadcast frequency bands (below 30MHz). The DRM signal fits into the AM broadcast-band plan and could be carried by many existing AM transmitters.
