D-FIRE: A DAB receiver system on a chip

The DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) receiver system, consisting of the digital baseband IC D-FIRE and the analogue front-end, offers the smallest formfactor available in the market today. The power consumption of the complete system is less than 2 Watt in total for full-stream decoding. This paper describes the first true VLSI single chip solution for DAB. D - FIRE (DAB - Fully Integrated Receiver Engine) is a 7 Mio transistor chip fabricated in LSI Logic 0.35 µ process. Due to the on-chip ADC, RAM and audio decoder, no additional hardware is required for audio only applications. Extended with 2 Mbit SRAM the maximum datarate of 1.7 Mbit/s can be decoded while the system can follow a multiplex re-configuration. This paper describes the architecture, some technical solutions and the features of D-FIRE.