Audio

CEVA's Multimedia DSP Cores: A Framework for Accessing Them, and a New MM3101 Imaging Algorithm

In January 2013, InsideDSP covered the CEVA-MM3101, the company's first DSP core targeted not only at still and video image encoding and decoding tasks (akin to the prior-generation MM2000 and MM3000) but also at a variety of image and vision processing tasks. At that time, the company published the following table of MM3101 functions that it provides to its licensees (Table 1): Table 1. The initial extensive software function library unveiled in conjunction with the CEVA-MM3101 introduction Read more...

Case Study: BDTI-Developed, DSP-Enabled Algorithms Optimize Speaker Sound

The tension between cost and quality is one of the fundamental tradeoffs in the design of consumer electronics devices—and many other systems. Customers predominantly select among competing products based on price, especially in these challenging economic times, but consumers are also unwilling to short-change perceived quality. For example, to minimize bill-of-materials costs, engineers prefer to incorporate low-cost speakers in their designs. These entry-level transducers typically exhibit Read more...

TrulyHandsFree: Always-On Speech Recognition From Sensory

"If it has speech recognition, why do we have to use our fingers?" According to Bernie Brafman, Vice President of Business Development at Sensory, that simple question has been at the forefront of many of the company's customers' minds throughout Sensory's 19-year existence. That same question has therefore guided the privately held company's technology and product roadmap. But actualizing this aspiration involves, at first glance, difficult tradeoffs. Always-active speech recognition requires Read more...

Case Study: BDTI Develops Optimized Audio Algorithms to Deliver the Sweet Sound of Success

Qualcomm recently opened up the QDSP6 (aka "Hexagon") DSP core in its Snapdragon SoCs to programming access by its customers and software developer partners. Multimedia applications, for example, can benefit from leveraging QDSP6 processing resources, boosting overall performance, minimizing overall power consumption, and freeing up the CPU to tackle other tasks. And mobile application processors such as Snapdragon are increasingly finding use in a diversity of embedded applications beyond the Read more...

QDSP6 V4: BDTI Benchmark Results and Implementation Details Of Qualcomm's DSP Core

The article, "QDSP6 V4: Qualcomm Gives Customers and Developers Programming Access to its DSP Core," which appeared in the June 2012 edition of InsideDSP, showcased Qualcomm’s decision to open up access to its DSP core via a software development kit. This decision corresponded with the release of the fourth version (V4) of the sixth generation (QDSP6, aka "Hexagon") of the company's proprietary DSP architecture, found in the company's 28 nm-based Snapdragon S4 SoCs. To be clear, this broadened Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Sound from the Cloud

In my December column, I wrote about how smartphones and tablets are subsuming some categories of consumer electronics, such as MP3 players and networked home audio players. Because smartphones and tablets are network-centric devices, their growing use as media players is contributing to another important trend: multimedia content is increasingly being delivered on-demand via the Internet. These days, I get nearly all of my new audio entertainment content, such as podcasts and streaming music, Read more...

Case Study: Measuring the Incremental Battery Draw of Advanced Audio Processing

Mobile phones are rapidly and dramatically expanding beyond their historical usage as voice-only communications devices, adding a variety of wireless data-fed text, email, web browsing and other functions, supplementing (and in many cases supplanting) the facilities of dedicated still and video cameras, and serving as portable multimedia playback platforms. But all of these functions consume power, and both users and designers of mobile phones are very concerned about battery life. Similarly, Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Will Smartphones and Tablets Subsume All Consumer Electronics?

In my October column, I explored the phenomenon of mobile application processors (the brains of smartphones and tablets) competing against more traditional types of embedded processors for use in embedded systems. But after writing that column, something happened that made me realize that mobile application processors don't necessarily have to be designed into embedded systems in order to compete against other kinds of embedded processors.  Smartphones and tablets themselves are already Read more...

Adapteva's Epiphany Floating Point Processor Core: A Leading-Edge Lithography May Finally Open Doors

Cost- and power consumption-sensitive digital signal processing applications tend to leverage fixed point processors, for a common fundamental reason: fixed-point processor cores are substantially less complex than their floating-point counterparts, leading to reductions in transistor count and silicon area. Yet fixed-point processing comes with trade-offs of its own; code development, for example, is complicated by the need to comprehend the potential for overflow, underflow and round-off Read more...

Spansion's Speech Recognition Coprocessor: Flash Memory with On-Board Search-Logic Power

Spansion is a name that's probably familiar to many of you, as a supplier of nonvolatile memories. You might be wondering, therefore, what the company's doing gracing the pages of InsideDSP. Well, hold that thought! Spansion was originally founded in 1993 as a joint venture of AMD and Fujitsu, and named FASL (Fujitsu AMD Semiconductor Limited). AMD took over full control of FASL in 2003, renamed it Spansion LLC in 2004 and spun it out as a standalone corporate entity at the end of 2005. Read more...