Advanced car radio tuner IC family reduces cost and complexity
According to Silicon Laboratories, theSi476x tuner family offers superior price/performance for the global car radio market and provides a best-in-class multiband receiver solution for automotive infotainment head-units and AM/FM car radios from all classes of providers ranging from Tier 1 suppliers to aftermarket car radio makers.
According to J.D. Power and Associates, the global automotive market is expected to exceed 76 million light-vehicle unit shipments this year. The car radio technology deployed in these vehicles is evolving rapidly as innovations in communication technology proliferate in the automotive infotainment market.
The basic car radio has been transformed into a sophisticated infotainment system that includes multiple tuners to deliver FM phase diversity reception, receive radio data system (RDS) data for info-navigation systems, support AM/FM HD Radio technology and provide detailed station quality metrics for living lists of broadcast content. These strenuous broadcast performance demands require advanced silicon innovations to enable a superior in-vehicle audio experience.
Silicon Labs developed the Si476x receiver family to address these major automotive industry trends. The Si476x receivers leverage the company’s patented digital low-IF technology and combine most of the traditional external bill of materials into a highly integrated, single-chip CMOS solution. The receivers offer a modular architecture supporting scalable multi-tuner designs. The Si476x supports all worldwide broadcast radio bands including AM/FM, college FM, longwave (LW), shortwave (SW), NOAA weather band, FM RDS decoding and AM/FM HD Radio reception.
The Si476x family represents the automotive industry’s first viable receiver alternative to enable developers to pair a best-in-class tuner IC with the choice of audio DSPs to create cost-effective back-end audio processing designs, Silicon Labs claims. The company has worked with silicon providers such as Cirrus Logic and Freescale Semiconductor to deliver audio system solutions that break the expensive partitioning approach required by current car audio solutions.
The linearity of the Si476x tuner’s integrated RF front-end, combined with on-chip radio DSP and microcontroller, delivers high RF dynamic range and immunity to multi-path fading, the chip vendor promises.
Samples and production quantities of the Si476x car radio tuner ICs are available now in a compact 6 mm x 6 mm 40-pin QFN package. Pricing for automotive-grade Si476x tuner ICs begins at $11.62 in 10,000-unit quantities. The Si4763LNA-A-EVB and Si4767PD-A-EVB evaluation boards are available to automotive customers for $450.
For additional Si476x product information, please visit www.silabs.com/pr/automotive-tuner.
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