Fast forward to 2019, Silicon Labs has incorporated the hybrid SDR tuners in its Dual Eagle family of AM/FM receivers and digital radio tuners to support global digital radio standards on a common platform.įigure 2: The DRM-capable Si4796x hybrid SDR chips combine AM/FM radio receiver with HD-Radio™/DAB/DAB+/DMB/DRM tuner.
SDR RECEIVER RADIO MODULE SOFTWARE
The software demodulator running on radio tuner IC’s embedded DSP allowed the infotainment SoC to support analog and digital radio specifications. On the software side, the R-Car infotainment SoC integrated digital radio demodulation software developed by M's Style Technology. And it’s apparent from chipmakers’ design roadmaps.įor instance, in 2017, when Norway announced the digital radio switch, Renesas turned its R-Car system-on-chip (SoC) for in-vehicle infotainment into an SDR-enabled platform by incorporating Silicon Labs’ Dual Eagle Si47961/Si47962 analog AM/FM radio receivers and digital radio tuners on the hardware front.
SDR RECEIVER RADIO MODULE UPGRADE
The SDR technology, commonly associated with wireless communications, is making steady headway in the automotive radio designs where the SDR-enabled tuner chips can upgrade frequency band, air interface and other aspects of radio functionality via software downloads. And different functions like modulation techniques and performance characteristics are defined in software as part of the waveform. In short, an SDR-enabled RF-CMOS chip can be reprogrammed or reconfigured with different waveforms and protocols via dynamic loading of new waveforms and protocols. in the digital domain and hands over the signals to a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) to turn the signal back to analog format and pass it on to an RF power amplifier for transmission. On the transmit side, a software-defined radio performs coding, modulation, etc. Finally, the signal is connected to a processor to tune the signal and extract the modulated audio or data. The signals are then filtered, demodulated, and separated into individual channels. On the receive side, a software-defined radio generally feeds the radio signals directly into an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to digitize the analog signal in the receiver as close to the antenna as practical. In other words, it can facilitate multiple standards in the same device by using reconfigurable hardware and powerful software.įigure 1: An RF front-end paired with a software demodulator to create an SDR solution. SDR, one of the most important technologies in the modern wireless arena, can tune to any frequency band and implement different modulation and demodulation schemes. And the hardware implementation of each standard could be expensive and added to the board real estate and power consumption.Įnter software-defined radio (SDR) solutions with their ability to support several digital radio standards with a single chip through tightly coupled RF front-end and baseband software. However, digital radio encompassed different broadcast standards - HD Radio, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) and Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) - that also occupied regional footprints. The digital radio broadcast also dramatically improved the reception while facilitating CD-quality sound without noise. In 2017, Norway vowed to switch off analog broadcasts in favor of digital radio that offered more stations and greater coverage compared to AM/FM radio.