As satellite digital radio services struggle for survival and terrestrial digital radio broadcasting in the United States faces at least three more months of dead air, Motorola Inc. is going retro, gambling on old-fashioned analog AM/FM.
Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector is rolling out a "digital radio" chip set, called Symphony, designed to improve tuning, filtering and audio processing of analog AM/FM broadcast signals. Leveraging software algorithms on a 24-bit DSP-based baseband/audio processor with 1,500 million instructions per second (Mips) of processing power, Symphony radio "can offer consumers less static, fading, pops and hisses while allowing them to receive more AM/FM radio channels," said John Hansen, strategic-marketing director for driver information systems at Motorola.
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