Digital Audio Broadcasting — Solutions for the Automotive Environment

Abstract

Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), based on the Eureka-147 specification is rapidly gaining a foothold in the consumer market, with an increasing number of broadcasters in many countries promoting the new services that DAB offers, as well as the excellent audio reproduction made possible through digital transmission.

Additionally, DAB offers significant extra capability for in-car infotainment systems from the large data capability supported by the Eureka standard. In the automotive environment this bandwidth can be deployed for traffic service information, using standards such as RDS-TMC and TPEG.

Also, emerging applications such as off-board navigation are very hungry for bandwidth, and with the right server technology in the broadcasting chain DAB offers a very credible alternative to the expensive cellular network for delivering large volumes of data to individual vehicles.

As the leading supplier of DAB solutions to the electronics industry, Frontier Silicon has also developed automotive DAB products, chipsets and modules, that enable 1st tier suppliers to quickly integrate DAB audio and data capability into their in-car systems.

This paper will cover the following points:

• Advantages and applications of DAB in the automotive marketplace.

• The design challenges inherent in implementing DAB in an automotive environment.

• Example automotive DAB solutions.

• Future roadmap for digital radio.