Pump up the volume
1 min read
The consumer electronics business is well versed at bringing new products to market with more features and, generally, at lower cost. But the trend does have something of a trade off.
Take the flat panel tv as an example. While we’re all looking for bigger screens, larger tvs take up a lot of room. Because many UK living rooms aren’t that large, we want the tvs to be ever thinner.
Meanwhile, with staying in becoming the new going out, we’re watching an increasingly wider range of content on our big screen tv – the living room and the cinema are rapidly becoming the same thing. We might have the 50in plasma screen and the Blu-ray dvd player; what we don’t generally get is the audio quality to go with it – unless we invest in a home theatre system.
It’s a problem that developers from all parts of the consumer electronics spectrum are grappling with. Part of the problem is convergence. In the past, you watched television programmes on the tv; you listened to radio programmes on the radio. Today, you can do all that from your pc – or you can use your tv as a pc monitor.
Skip Taylor is director of D2Audio Technology, recently acquired by Intersil. He’s been working on such problems for some time, developing a range of high performance audio products, including scalable power amplifiers and multichip dsp based audio signal processing for a range of applications.
Previously, he was a director at music equipment specialist Peavey Electronics, where he managed the development of the industry’s first high performance Class D amplifier for professional use.
The original idea for D2Audio grew from the industry’s desire to move to digital technology, said Taylor. “Previous attempts had failed,” he observed, “because there was a lack of technology that could displace the existing analogue solutions. The D2Audio team had been working in the technology for some time, but didn’t have the ability to focus on an ic based solution. So we took everything we knew that didn’t work; everything that stopped Class AB technology from becoming prolific and developed our capability.”
Although D2Audio was established in 2002, many of the company’s engineering team had been working on similar problems since the mid 1980s. The breakthrough came with the development of low cost, high performance dsps. “Before that,” he said, “we couldn’t do it in a cost effective manner.”
Taylor noted that low cost dsps allowed D2Audio to create an SoC without requiring a large piece of silicon and a ‘huge cost’.
