Continental to Support All Car Radio Standards in Software

Automotive solution provider Continental today announced its Global Software Radio technology that allows to receive all format of digital and analog radio through a single hardware and an innovative software stack.

“The Global Software Radio is future-proof, as new radio broadcasting standards or new data services can be integrated with a software update. Conventional radios can only offer this diversity by using additional – and comparably expensive – hardware,“ explained Continental.

With the development of digital radio worldwide the number of different radio standards is rapidly expanding. Nowadays automotive OEMs with worldwide presence have to support HD Radio, DAB, DMB, DRM as well as the legacy FM and AM analog formats.

Called “software-defined radio system“ by specialists, the technology developed by Continental, instead of using special purpose hardware to process each of the radio signals, is using a general-purpose processor. While not new per se, this technology is becoming easier to implement and more affordable due to developments in digital electronics.

With this technology automakers will not only be able to receive all radio stations emitting in these standards but also the information feeds such as traffic, weather, etc transiting on these standards through RDS-TMC or TPEG.