Texas Instruments and Fraunhofer IIS Enable High-Performance Surround Audio Streaming on Popular TI DSP Platform

Fraunhofer’s high-quality MPEG Surround audio streaming technology to provide consumers with surround Internet radio experiences in the living room

ERLANGEN, Germany & LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--At CES 2011, Fraunhofer IIS, the world’s authoritative source of audio and multimedia technologies, today announced in partnership with Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI), the availability of MPEG Surround audio streaming on TI’s popular DSP platform.

Manufacturers of TI-powered consumer electronics devices such as AV receivers will have easy access to the Fraunhofer MPEG Surround decoding software as part of the recently announced TI Network Audio SDK.

With Fraunhofer’s technology, Internet broadcasters and pure play music services will be able to provide an immersive surround audio experience to consumers that will clearly distinguish them from their competitors. MPEG Surround allows the cost-efficient delivery of surround audio at stereo bitrates as low as 64 kbit/s for 5.1-channels. Users can enjoy the streams in the highest quality on surround-enabled devices and stereo equipment made possible with the stereo-compatible nature of the codec.

With the integration of MPEG Surround into TI’s Networked Audio Software Development kit (nSDK), audio consumer electronics manufacturers will be able to bring multichannel streaming products to market with significantly reduced software development effort. The TI nSDK facilitates software development on the DA8x family of networked audio processors. The nSDK includes a comprehensive package of pre-integrated online music services as well as implementations of network interoperability standards, multichannel and stereo codecs, audio post processing, streaming audio over USB and much more.

TI reference design implementations of MPEG Surround Streaming will be demonstrated during CES 2011 at Fraunhofer’s booth, No. 21828.

MPEG Surround is an ISO standard co-developed by Fraunhofer IIS. Software implementations for device manufacturers are available on various embedded platforms. Broadcasters and music service providers can offer their streams efficiently by using Fraunhofer’s encoding and streaming software solutions that are available directly from Fraunhofer or as part of various third party vendor products.

About Fraunhofer

The Fraunhofer IIS Audio and Multimedia division, based in Erlangen, Germany, has been working in compressed audio technology for more than 20 years and remains a leading innovator of technologies for cutting-edge multimedia systems. Fraunhofer IIS is universally credited with the development of mp3 and co-development of AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) as well as technologies for the media world of tomorrow, including MPEG Surround, MPEG Spatial Audio Object Coding and the Fraunhofer Audio Communication Engine.

Through the course of more than two decades, Fraunhofer IIS has licensed its audio codec software and application-specific customizations to at least 1,000 companies. Fraunhofer estimates that it has enabled more than 1 billion commercial products worldwide using its mp3, AAC and other media technologies.

The Fraunhofer IIS organization is part of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, based in Munich, Germany. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is Europe’s largest applied research organization and is partly funded by the German government. With nearly 17,000 employees worldwide, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is composed of 59 Institutes conducting research in a broad range of research areas. For more information, contact Matthias Rose, [e-mail], or visit www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm.

About Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) helps customers solve problems and develop new electronics that make the world smarter, healthier, safer, greener and more fun. A global semiconductor company, TI innovates through design, sales and manufacturing operations in more than 30 countries. For more information, go to www.ti.com.