Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

Headquartered in Watford with a research base in Cambridge, Frontier has just surpassed five million sales for its DAB integrated circuits and modules, highlighting its continued leading position in digital audio with a DAB receiver market share of over 75 per cent.

While this percentage is largely due to DAB's (Digital Audio Broadcasting, or digital radio) predominance in the UK, the new DAB+ standard is expected to open new markets for digital radios around the world and Frontier expects DAB/DAB+ exponential growth over the next five years.

The UK DAB industry boasts a listening base of nearly one in five of the adult population - where it has an 80 per cent market share - with Denmark, Norway Germany, Belgium and Switzerland contributing the rest.

The new DAB+ standard will bring in new countries such as Australia, which is launching its digital audio services in January 2009, with others expected to follow suit including Italy, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Malta, Israel, Hungary, Kuwait, Malaysia and New Zealand.

Frontier's success has been achieved after just five years of operation.

CEO Anthony Sethill said: "With the positive reaction in the broadcaster community to the announcement of the DAB+ standard we are very excited about the prospects for DAB/DAB+ radios and we expect to see significant expansion in this industry over the coming years."

Despite its youth, Frontier Silicon has amassed a powerful portfolio of digital audio products with a current line up including a multistandard module incorporating DAB+/DAB, Wi-Fi and music streaming (Venice 6), and a low-cost module for mass market DAB radios (Venice 5).

All Frontier modules are based on the company's optimised Chorus 2 and Kino 2 broadcast receiver ICs and have associated platforms to enable rapid time-to-market (the Jupiter, Mercury and Quantum ranges).

The latest platforms also feature iPod® docking capability, which is fast becoming a 'musthave' in new radio designs.

Established in 2001 as a privately funded fabless semiconductor company, Frontier now has over 200 employees; besides its East of england operations it has bases in Dublin, Hong Kong, China, Korea and Japan.

Products include audio processors for digital radio and network streaming, and receiver solutions for mobile TV, supporting multiple broadcast standards including DVB-H, DVB-T, T-DMB and DAB-IP.

Customers include Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Bang & Olufsen, Bush, Denon, Goodmans, Grundig, Hitachi, JVC, Onkyo, Philips, PURE Digital, ROBERTS, Sanyo, TEAC and Yamaha.