Texas Instruments Announces Industry's First Technology Development for Digital Multimedia Broadcasting Receivers

Pioneering new application areas for digital broadcasting, Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) at the Korean Electronics Show in Seoul became the world's first semiconductor supplier to announce the development of technology to be used in receivers supporting Korean Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) Standard. Continuing its leadership in the global terrestrial digital radio market, TI has joined forces with the South Korean software developer PixTree Technologies and digital radio manufacturer Perstel Limited to create a complete hardware and software solution for DMB receivers. TI plans to make the solution available to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for developing products for the South Korean DMB market in early 2004. (See'www.ti.com/dmbpr.)

Digital Multimedia Broadcasting adds video and other information to Eureka Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) channels through the use of a wider transmission bandwidth and video encoding and decoding. South Korea, already engaged in DAB, plans to have video broadcasts for early 2004.

Combining its expertise from both the DAB and digital multimedia markets, TI will use the technology from its digital media family of digital signal processors (DSP), coupled with PixTree's video and audio software, to build a new DMB chip. OEMs, like Perstel, will be able to add the new DMB chip to TI's DRE310 digital baseband (announced in June 2003) to rapidly enhance the functionality of existing DAB designs with video, audio, and additional data decoding capabilities for the reception of DMB transmissions. TI's DRE310 is the only DAB baseband in the world suitable for cost-effective and low power DMB applications. In addition to the DRE310, the new DMB chip is expected to power DMB receivers for car and portable applications in 2004.

On October 8, 2003, Naresh Coppisetti will discuss status of worldwide digital radio, DMB and TI's technology development at the Digital Multimedia Broadcasting Forum at the Korean Electronics Show in Seoul.