SGTL Update - SigmaTel Experiences Widespread Acceptance of Its Advanced Radio Architecture - Company Ships More Than Eight Hundred Thousand STFM1000 FM Tuner Units in Q4 2005
biz.yahoo.com
AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 17, 2006--SigmaTel Inc. (NASDAQ:SGTL - News), a leader in mixed-signal multimedia semiconductors, today announced that it shipped more than 800,000 units of its new STFM1000 FM tuner product in the fourth quarter of 2005. The STFM1000 is the company's first FM tuner solution and is a companion processor for SigmaTel's STMP3500 and STMP3600 families of System on Chip (SoC) portable multimedia solutions. The STFM1000's high level of integration enabled by the optimized radio architecture provides customers with superior FM performance at the lowest system cost on the market today. SigmaTel delivered reference designs and a software development kit based for the STFM1000 to customers in late November 2005.
"SigmaTel is very pleased with the adoption and interest in the STFM1000 FM tuner product and we are confident that we are offering customers the most competitive portable multimedia platform on the market," said Michael Wodopian, senior vice president, Portable System on Chip Group at SigmaTel. "SigmaTel set very aggressive goals with the FM tuner product and to date the product has met or exceeded all expectations and we see it as a true competitive differentiator."
The powerful combination of the STFM1000 and SigmaTel's highly integrated, portable multimedia SoCs can be used to power digital audio players, PDAs, voice recorders, portable video players, and digital photo wallets. The optimized radio architecture of the STFM1000 is designed to offer low power consumption, minimal external components for small form factor design, and low cost through optimum system partitioning.
The SigmaTel STFM1000 digitally transmits data to SoCs, such as the STMP3500 or STMP3600, resulting in the same audio effects while listening to FM radio that a user experiences while listening to MP3. Data is digitally transmitted to SoCs through a standard I2S interface and offers additional features through a proprietary interface with the STMP3600 such as signal quality indicators and RDS. In addition, the STFM1000 includes a standard 3-wire I2S interface to support the STMP3500 and a number of other SoCs on the market such as those found in many of today's cell phones.
The SigmaTel FM tuner has high sensitivity due to its integrated low-noise RF amplifier, resulting in better FM performance as well as complex filtering to trade off fidelity for improved noise suppression under poor signal conditions. The optimized radio architecture supports the U.S., Europe, Japan and Asia FM bands and its innovative design has resulted in 15 filed patent applications and other patent applications that are in process.
FROM POST at 1/10/2006 9:14:47 AM
SGTL update report from CES in Las Vegas last week...
dapreview.net
The highlight of our trip to CES was the visit with Sigmatel. We're jazzed about this company because they bought all of the intellectual property from Rio Audio (which folded operations in 2005) and they also acquired the engineering team that designed the software inside the Rio Karma. As you might be able to tell from our logo, the Karma is a house favorite around here. It's pretty old at this point (released 10/2003), and long out of production, but it has some advanced playback features which have yet to be matched: gapless playback of MP3s, crossfading between tracks (all formats), and a highly-customizable EQ system. The Karma also has a fantastic GUI system. Our hope is that we will see a Karma-like product again in the future... so we've been keeping a close eye on developments at Sigmatel.
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This new System on Chip (SoC), the STMP3600, is a 200mhz ARM9 design, with built-in DAC, USB 2.0 and USB OTG, 256kb on-chip RAM, etc. According to the Simgatel reps, the low-power design will allow for about 50% longer playtime than the average DAP. Using the 3600, they estimated that you could get about 30 hours of playback using the same hardware in the Rio Carbon.
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Hugo said that production of the 3600 is expected to start in Q2 2006. In turn, we could see products based on the Avalon's reference design to emerge at the end of 2006.
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