Audio IC wolf smoke burning in ears

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The audio industry was definitely an extraordinary year in 2013 and a year full of challenges and opportunities.

High-fidelity audio products, wireless headphones, and wireless digital speaker products want to lead the audio industry's decline in the past year, not only accelerating the upgrading of the original products, but also spreading from the trend of smartphones, tablets and digital industries to the surroundings Electronic accessories products. In the second half of the year, Bluetooth 4.0, intelligent voice, high-definition transmission interfaces, the Internet of Things and Apple's peripheral products suddenly exerted strength, drawing a perfect stop to the audio industry in 2013. With the opening of the TD-LTE license in China's 4G era Further approaching has also brought huge opportunities and challenges to the audio IC company, and also let us see the prosperous scene of the audio industry in 2014.

Intelligent voice can go hand in hand for major audio IC manufacturers

As the sales of portable smart devices maintain rapid growth, the market share is similar, the pattern is undecided, and the product form and hardware and software structure are not finally formed. It is for these reasons that in the field of personal consumer electronics, audio ICs have the biggest variables. A competing place for all manufacturers.

Robert Schoenfield, vice president of Audience ’s market development department, emphasized that Audience ’s latest es515 chip has taken the lead in solving the problem of advanced voice technology and codec integration. With this unique technological innovation, the es515 chip can very well eliminate background noise, and has Very good voice processing. It is reported that Samsung's latest smartphone GALAXY S4 is the es515 intelligent voice processor used.

As Audience products have been applied to mobile phone brands such as Apple, Samsung, LG, Sharp, etc., with the explosive growth of smart mobile devices, China has surpassed the United States to become the world's largest smartphone market. In 2012, China's smartphone market reached 1.78 100 million. In 2017, it is expected to reach 458 million units. Facing China's huge market, Audience actively cooperates with domestic local enterprises and operators to rapidly expand the Chinese market and attack the audio IC market.

Coincidentally, Wolfson, a well-known audio IC manufacturer, is also aiming at the Chinese market, and it has won a victory, obtaining orders for Lenovo smartphones. Talking about Wolfson ’s unique advantages in audio technology, John Forsyth, Vice President of Audio Solutions Product Management at Wolfson, emphasized that even in the noisiest environment, consumers are increasingly demanding the superior audio experience provided by their smartphones. The higher. The cooperation with Lenovo helps its flagship smartphone to provide extraordinary audio.

Unlike the above manufacturers, InvenSense actively expands the audio business territory by focusing on the future development potential of the wearable device market. Some time ago, InvenSense announced that it has put the ADI Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) microphone product line under its control. InvenSense President and CEO Behrooz Abdi said that InvenSense has a place in the MEMS market with a motion tracking solution, and is looking at the market opportunities brought by the increase in the proportion of additional MEMS microphones attached to each high-end mobile phone. At the same time, this transaction case can not only Accelerate the expansion of InvenSense's audio layout, and it can also be its current MEMS SoC customers (including wearable devices).

The continuous development of technology has rapidly driven a huge change in the computer interface. From the simple command line in the 1980s to the computer graphical interface in the 1990s, now the human operation interface under the leadership of Apple, Google, and Samsung has entered the era of touch. The more concise it is, the introduction of Apple Siri has brought humanity into the voice era. In the future, it only needs to speak to issue instructions, just like the protagonist Stark in the Iron Man movie. However, the realization of this technology requires clear voice, and the device has excellent voice recognition capabilities.

In fact, the explosion point of intelligent voice has been highlighted. Taking the introduction of the voice cloud of HKUST in 2011 as a time node, it marks a new stage for the Chinese voice industry. As of March this year, Xunfei voice cloud users exceeded 33 million, more than 3,100 cooperative development partners, companies from the Internet, mobile phones, home appliances and automotive and other important fields are popularizing intelligent voice applications. In the future, with the further popularization of mobile Internet, the domestic Internet giants Baidu, Tencent and other gunpowder will continue to smell, and the Chinese intelligent voice industry will also gain more opportunities for development, and this will also promote more industries in China to achieve greater global voice .

According to statistics, China's smart voice market added 11 million users last year, and surged 60 million in the first half of this year. In the near future, China's voice applications will become standard. Prior to this, most of the voice technology remained at the level of recognition applications, and Nuance, the supplier behind Siri, has relied on the open platform to spur the tens of billions of industry chains. For the Chinese market, the scale of the voice industry is even more immeasurable. The establishment of the industrial alliance indicates that the voice industry will receive policy support and enter the fast lane of development.

Not only Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other giants have launched smart voice services on their own terminals and applications. At the same time, they have opened up development platforms, and a number of TV manufacturers, including Chinese brands, are also eager to covet this wave. Smart TV with a voice selling point. It can be said that the voice industry is becoming a new business opportunity and commanding heights seized by the global IT industry. In the future, the application of intelligent voice is bound to flourish, and manufacturers and market participants in the market need to pay close attention to the development trend of technical products.

The audio ecological opportunity that the algorithm extends

Since the role of audio and voice processing functions in mobile phones and other consumer electronic products is becoming more and more important, OEMs now hope to achieve product differentiation through some audio functions. This is for those who are beamforming to reduce noise , Voice activation, 3D surround sound and other processing functions, it is very important for many innovative companies that develop complex audio and speech algorithms. These algorithms are developing at an extremely fast speed, so developers need to implement these algorithms in software, which means they need direct access to the DSP core.

In the constantly growing audio and speech processing ecosystem, emerging algorithm vendors constitute an important part of it, and it indicates that new vendors will continue to enter this field. In 2011, CEVA and Alango cooperated to develop a voice enhancement function including up to 8 microphones, and recently CEVA announced that it will cooperate with NXP Software and DiMagic.

NXP Software will provide algorithms for beamforming, noise suppression, and voice adjustment to improve the quality of the voice recognition experience; these algorithms have been shipped to major OEMs using the CEVA-TeakLite-III architecture. DiMagic also provides beamforming and noise suppression technologies, which are used in CEVA-TeakLite series cores in automotive applications.

It is worth noting that the development ecology of various algorithms with adjustable audio quality is gradually taking shape. A software company with this software development strength or an engineer who is interested in starting a business in this subdivision field may be a value point of differentiated innovation, and can also pay attention. Follow-up development trends.

This article is excerpted from the "i Innovation" column of the special video and audio technology issue of the electronic enthusiast website in November. Please indicate the source when reprinting!