The Chorus 2, launched last August, and the Chorus 2i are made using a 0.13-micron process from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. "The dif- ference between the two chips is the firmware," said Evans. The Apollo DAB/FM tuner is manufactured in a 0.35-micron process by Austriamicrosystems AG.
Evans declined to reveal who has won the Wi-Fi design-in on the new Venice 6 Internet radio module. It is due to ship in the second half, in time to fill the supply pipeline for next year's holiday buying season.
Evans leans on market estimates to show the scale of the Inter- net radio opportunity. Broadband households were estimated at 200 million in 2006, with Wi-Fi penetration of those households at about 30 percent. If only 1 percent of those households bought an Internet radio, it would translate into a market of 600,000 units. Evans sees Internet radio growing along with Wi-Fi penetration, yielding the opportunity for a 10 million-unit market in 2009.
The Venice 6 module, he said, "takes the product out of the European market, where DAB is prevalent. This is good for Asia and the U.S." The question is whether users will be prepared to pay a premium for Internet radio. "We're trying to get the overall BOM [bill of materials] of the radio down," said Rajalingham. Frontier-based DAB/FM radios sell for $40 to $120; Internet versions would retail for a bit more.
Cost cutters
Cambridge Consultants has also done its best to wring costs out of its Wi-Fi portable radio design. "Our design ethos has focused on stripping the BOM to the absolute minimum and optimizing power consumption," said Duncan Smith, head of consumer products at Cambridge Consultants, in a statement. "As a result, we believe this platform could stimulate a new category of consumer electronics product, or act as a cost-effective add-on for established product lines such as DAB and satellite radios or MP3 players, or even a product associated with a brand such as a broadband service provider."
Cambridge Consultants is planning on showing a number of potential equipment form factors for its Iona platform at CES, including wearable and tabletop designs, in the hope of getting OEMs to bite in time for the 2007 holiday buying season.
The design requires just two major ICs: an 802.11b/g device and a multimedia applications chip combining DSP capability with a 16-bit XAP processor core from Cambridge Consultants. The hardware is programmable and is capable of supporting RTP, HTTP and RDT protocols, along with MMS, MP3, WMA, AAC, AIFF and WAV data formats, and SNTP clock functionality. The platform also supports WEP, WPA and WPA2 security.
In addition to minimizing the BOM, Cambridge Consultants' de- sign focuses on reducing power consumption, allowing personal radio products to operate for up to 30 hours from two standard AA cells if the access point supports power-saving mode, or in excess of 15 hours otherwise.
"Traditional radios offer listeners the choice of relatively few stations. . . . Internet radio gives listeners access to many thousands, catering for very specific tastes from the mainstream to the exotic," Smith said. "Internet radio also allows you to tune in to your hometown station wherever you happen to be in the world."
