D-day for DAB patents

Patents for which the manufacturers of DAB digital radios pay royalties expire today, clearing the way for lower prices and easier integration.

The final expiry of various patents related to DAB digital radio products is good news for both manufacturers and consumers. From today, any shipments into countries where the patents have expired are no longer liable for the royalty payment. With standard retail multipliers, that could mean that the price of entry-level of devices would fall by approximately 5.

More freedom And as DAB becomes a public domain "free-to-implement" technology like FM, it is easier to have it as a default option in multi-purpose radio chips. For example, DAB could be implemented alongside WiFi, Bluetooth, FM, GPS, etc. on the combo chip commonly found in mobile phones or tablets.

The patents are the intellectual property of various companies within a pool which is administered by Philips. While they had already expired last year in some markets, from today they no longer apply in some of the largest key markets, including France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.

What about DAB+? The Philips patent pool provided a one-stop shop to get all the licenses needed for DAB technology - things like the layer 2 audio decoder and the channel decoder, including synchronisation, time and frequency deinterleaving. The DAB+ royalty, which is specifically for HE-AACv2 and is paid to Via Licensing, only needs to be paid once. This means that if a manufacturer already has an internet radio product that needs HE-AAC to handle IP streams, then that will also cover DAB+.

The family of digital radio standards based on the Eureka-147 Digital Audio Broadcasting system is coordinated by the WorldDMB organization.

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