Advances reported for digital radio technologies
By George Leopold
EE Times
(01/28/00, 12:41 p.m. EST)
WASHINGTON ? USA Digital Radio took another step to advance its proposed U.S. standard to the global market this week. The company said it is collaborating with Digital Radio Mondiale, a global broadcasting consortium based in Geneva, to develop a worldwide standard for digital AM broadcasting. The partners said their aim is to ensure that receivers purchased anywhere in the world will work anywhere in the world.
Competitor Lucent Digital Radio also reported progress this week in propelling its perceptual audio coder (PAC) technology forward.
In December, USA Digital Radio had joined forces with another developer, Digital Radio Express (Milpitas, Calif.), to promote USA Digital's in-band, on-channel (Iboc) solution to regulators. The Federal Communications Commission issued a notice of proposed rule making in November as the first step toward forging a U.S. digital radio standard. Both USA Digital and Lucent Digital Radio are proposing Iboc systems.
"We are prepared to take the next steps toward global implementation," said Robert Struble, president and chief executive of USA Digital Radio (Columbia, Md.).
Platform on a chip
Meanwhile, Lucent Digital Radio (a spinoff of Lucent Technologies) is eyeing entry into the semiconductor business to offer a PAC-based digital radio receiver platform on a chip. PAC is an audio compression algorithm originally developed by Bell Labs to compress audio for transmission or storage. Lucent Digital Radio is now tailoring it for a variety of applications.
The company announced this week at a music conference in France that it has licensed an enhanced version of PAC to Intel Corp. for use in Intel's Software Integrity System, designed to offer tamper-resistant technology to protect Internet music.
It also announced a deal with Blue Spike Inc. (Miami), a leading developer of secure digital watermarking applications, to incorporate Lucent's enhanced PAC into Blue Spike's music security system.
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