MUMBAI: As India gears up for the transition to digital broadcasting, NXP has emerged as the first company to successfully test the DRM signals and complete a live in-car demo supporting all major digital terrestrial radio standards on a single automotive co-processor.

NXP Semiconductors, the world’s largest supplier of car infotainment semiconductors successfully completed live reception of all three major terrestrial digital radio standards namely DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale), DAB and HD Radio in a car. The live public demo took place at the Broadcast Engineering Society (BES EXPO 2013) event in New Delhi.

DRM Consortium chairman Ruxandra Obreja said, “The automotive industry in India, and in the rest of the world, is one of the biggest drivers of the transition from analogue to digital radio. NXP’s live demonstration of a DRM car receiver at the BES event was a giant step in this transition. The work and tests which have been carried out since then by local agencies highlight that DRM in India is a reality and that the auto industry is at the forefront of the Indian digital radio roll-out.”

Following a series of comprehensive field trials to ensure that they met the requirements of the Indian market, NXP’s demonstration confirmed the company’s leadership in the automotive digital radio market. The demo was conducted in cooperation with All India Radio (AIR). The test was held ahead of the country’s national roll-out of DRM, and was achieved using NXP’s innovative software-defined multi-standard co-processor for automotive terrestrial digital radio reception.

At the event, NXP’s DRM demo car generated huge interest and was visited by a number of delegates from government organizations and the automotive industry.

The company’s R&D center in Bangalore played a key role in integrating DRM decoder functionality into the company’s automotive terrestrial digital radio solution, in order to create a truly multi-standard chipset that can be used in markets around the world. It enables manufacturers to achieve significant economies of scale by having just one global hardware platform for the three main terrestrial digital radio standards.

NXP Semiconductors senior director global sales and marketing for India Ashok Chandak said, “It’s incredibly exciting to have participated in this live DRM demonstration in India, showing that it’s possible to achieve high-quality digital radio performance even in AM bands. With this demo, we have become the first semiconductor company to demonstrate digital audio across all three global standards from the same car radio co-processor – a real milestone for NXP. Already, several automotive and car radio manufacturers have shown strong interest in using our DRM solution for future deployment. Many millions of people in India who haven’t had a chance to receive and experience FM radio quality before will soon be able to enjoy DRM, so it’s great to be playing a role in making this happen.”

The DRM standard is currently being implemented in emerging markets like India, providing FM-comparable or better audio quality on the AM radio band.

As per reports, AM covers over 98 per cent of the population in India, while only 37 per cent of listeners can currently receive the FM signal. The advantages of shifting to DRM transmitters is that it significantly improves audio quality at a low cost, while providing additional data services including traffic updates, natural disaster warnings and news.