Germany drives in-car TV for World Cup games

Pilot T-DMB project has been timed to coincide with the World Cup

STMicroelectronics has announced that its complete system for mobile TV will be used in what it claims is Europe's first implementation of in-car Terrestrial - Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (T-DMB) receivers.

The pilot project, implemented in cooperation with Blaupunkt, has been timed to coincide with the World Cup in Germany.

As part of the trial, World Cup matches will be broadcast over DMB in 12 German cities, including Berlin, Munich and Cologne.

DMB is a digital transmission system for sending data, radio and TV to mobile devices based on the Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) standard.

The T-DMB Mobile TV service uses the existing DAB infrastructure, which is operational in Germany and most other European countries.

Connected to the DAB radio receiver inside the car, the T-DMB decoder is based on ST's latest Nomadik mobile multimedia processor, the STn8810.

Nomadik's distributed architecture combines an ARM9 processor with smart accelerators for audio and video decoding, and an advanced power management unit on a single chip.

The system-on-a-chip also features a rich set of peripheral interfaces for seamless connection to external components, including the car radio, digital-to-analogue converters for top-quality audio and video playback, memory cards (SD/MMC) or USB.