The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft is the leading organization of applied research in Germany. It operates 58 research centers in Germany with about 12,500 employees, more than half of them scientists and engineers. The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft expands to a worldwide Organization, especially in USA and Asia. Home of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft is Munich, Germany.

One of the goals of the Fraunhofer policy is a rapid transfer of innovations into products. The total research expenditure is over one billion Euro.

The Fraunhofer-Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen IIS (Fraunhofer IIS), based in Erlangen, Germany, is one of the 58 research centers. Fraunhofer IIS is the leading international research lab in the field of high quality low bit rate audio coding. In its "Audio & Multimedia (AMM)" department cluster, a team of 80 engineers focuses on the development of audiovisual solutions. Fraunhofer IIS has been the main developer of the most advanced audio coding schemes, like MPEG Layer-3 (mp3) and MPEG AAC (Advanced Audio Coding). Fraunhofer IIS plays a major role in the MPEG-4 Audio standardization process and contributes to many other standardization efforts as well, like 3GPP, AES, DMDA, DRM, DVB, DVD, EBU, ISMA, MPEG-7, MPEG-21, ITU-R WP6A and ITU-R WP6Q.

WWW:		http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de
		http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm