SGS-THOMSON and WorldSpace sign contract for personal satellite radio chipset to bring CD-quality radio to millions

Paris, 5 June 1996 -- SGS-THOMSON Microelectronics today announced the signing of a contract with WorldSpace for the development and production of chip sets for new generation personal satellite radios.

WorldSpace will provide direct-to-listener digital satellite radio services to billions of people in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to voice and music the WorldSpace satellites will offer other services including text, fax, electronic mail, paging and slow motion video. Electronic manufacturers from around the world will produce receivers for the new services, based on chips developed by SGS-THOMSON.

Commenting on the agreement, Aldo Romano, Corporate Vice Presdient and General Manager of SGS-THOMSON's Dedicated Products Group, said "Thanks to our development expertize in audio/video compression, our leading technologies and our volume manufacturing capability, SGS-THOMSON can deliver these high performance devices in large quantities and at the targeted consumer cost".

"This is one of the most significant contracts which WorldSpace has signed in the development of its global digital audio broadcasting service," said Noah A Samara, chairman and CEO, WorldSpace. "This contract allows WorldSpace to ensure that the inexpensive (less than $100) radios are available in our 4.5 billion people marketplace at the start of the service. We reasonably expect, within a few years after operation, these radio prices to drop even further, accessing more and more of this huge emerging marketplace."

At the heart of these new receivers will be the "Starman" chip set now being developed by SGS-THOMSON which performs all of the receiver and decoder functions, accepting radio frequency signals from the antenna at one end and providing digital audio output at the other. SGS-THOMSON is integrating these functions in three chips: an Analog Front End, a Channel Decoder and a Source Decoder. The Source Decoder decodes the MPEG 2 layer 3 scheme used to compress the audio signals. In future the channel and source decoder circuits -- both high-density CMOS circuits -- will be combined into one circuit, reducing cost and consumption.

SGS-THOMSON was chosen to supply these chip sets because of the company's successful experience in developing and producing the MPEG digital video circuits for consumer video markets. DirecTV, the world's first digital satellite TV service, was made possible by SGS-THOMSON's consumer MPEG technology. Moreover, SGS-THOMSON is one of the very few companies having a sufficiently broad range of technology expertise to develop leading edge radio-frequency circuits, high-density CMOS logic and a solid base of manufacturing facilities, now being expanded with new 8" wafer fabs.

Samples of the SGS-THOMSON chip set will be available to receiver manufacturers for evaluation in 1997. Production is scheduled to start in 1998 to coincide with the startup of the first satellite, AfriStar, which will cover Africa, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf plus parts of the Near East and Europe.

The contract was signed on 30 May 1996 by Noah A Samara, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of WorldSpace and by SGS-THOMSON's Aldo Romano, Corporate VP and General Manager of the Dedicated Products Group.

SGS-THOMSON Microelectronics is a global independent semiconductor company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and on the Bourse de Paris. The company designs, develops, manufactures and markets a broad range of semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) and discrete devices used in a wide variety of microelectronics applications, including telecommunication systems, computer systems, consumer products, automotive products and industrial automation and control systems.

Technical backgrounder - the SGS-THOMSON Starman chip set

The "Starman" receiver system conceived by WorldSpace has been structured by SGS-THOMSON as a three-layer processing chain, that performs, respectively, carrier demodulation, forward error correction and audio signal decoding. Each layer will be implemented in a single integrated circuit, matching the best technology with the specific function.

The first chip is the Analog Front-End, capable of processing the radio-frequency Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK) signal modulating a carrier in the range of 1.5 GHz (L-band) transmitted by the satellite. The chip provides at its output an in-phase/quadrature analog representation of the signal in the 0 to 3.5MHz band. This chip will be developed using the "HSB2" process, an advanced bipolar technology, capable of speeds above 20GHz, specifically developed by SGS-THOMSON for radio-frequency front end circuits, and already used in L-band receivers.

The second chip (the Channel Decoder) integrates an analog-to-digital converter, QPSK demodulator, a sub-channel selector (program selection), and a forward error corrector which exploits sophisticated techniques for channel coding, allowing an overall bit error rate able to preserve all the original high quality characteristic of the signal. The MPEG-coded bit stream packet length at the output of the Channel Decoder ranges from 16Kbit/s (AM monaural quality) up to 128Kbit/s (CD stereo quality) while still compressed according to MPEG 2, layer 3 standard.

The third chip, Source Decoder, performs the MPEG 1/2 Layer 3 decompression algorithm; MPEG 2 Layer 3 is widely recognized as the most advanced audio signal compression standard. Its compression factor of 12:1 allows a low bit rate transmission that matches the requirements of low power consumption. SGS-THOMSON is leader in the MPEG technology addressed to audio and video signal processing, and this chip is the natural evolution to the wide family today in production.

Both the Channel and Source Decoders will be designed in an advanced, very high density (0.35 micron) CMOS technology and produced in 8" wafer diffusion facilities. This approach will also enable the future integration of the two functions in a single piece of silicon, further reducing cost and power consumption - both the key economic issues in a portable system.

The design activities will involve a multi-disciplinary team of designers, skilled in RF technology, in high level system architectures, in compression algorithms and in advanced CAD tools for very complex digital design and simulation.

The global effort is estimated at more than 25 man years, with the target to deliver the complete chipset in volume by 1998, when the first satellite will become operational.

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