Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) announced that NXP Semiconductors will support Fraunhofer’s MPEG Audio Software Development Kit (SDK).

MPEG-H Audio is an advanced audio system for UHD-TV and streaming. It supports both sound and the ability for users to adjust elements in the audio to their preferences. MPEG-H is the distribution format of the new music streaming service 360 Reality Audio. Fraunhofer offers MPEG-H software implementations for many popular CPU, SoC, and DSP platforms. It is deployed today in TV sets, premium sound bars and high-end smart speakers.

This software package covers four generations of audio codecs: legacy MPEG Layer-1/2/3, the next-generation MPEG-H 3D Audio standard, and the AAC codec family, including xHE-AAC. NXP will incorporate these codecs into its multimedia system solutions for audio quality in home entertainment products, such as set-top boxes, sound bars, or smart speakers.

xHE-AAC is a solution for digital radio broadcasting, for adaptive audio, and video streaming services over the Internet. It offers a bit rate range from 12 kbit/s to 500 kbit/s and above for stereo services, combined with seamless bit rate switching over DASH and HLS, as well as mandatory MPEG-D DRC loudness and dynamic range control. The codec is natively supported by the Android 9 and 10 operating systems, as well as iOS 13 and Amazon Fire OS 7.

NXP also plans to leverage the Fraunhofer MPEG-H Audio System Trademark Program to test its MPEG-H decoder implementation. This will indicate to manufacturers that NXP’s decoder implementation fulfills all mandatory requirements of Fraunhofer’s MPEG-H Audio System trademark program.

For more information, please visit: https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en.html