Audio technology is optimised for ARC cores

Sonic's Embedded Audio Synthesis technology is now available for the ARCsound audio subsystem.

Sonic's Embedded Audio Synthesis (EAS) technology is now available for the ARCsound audio subsystem.

Optimised to ARC's patented configurable architecture, Sonic's EAS technology is ideal for designers of high volume mobile devices where low power consumption and a small memory footprint are critical to developing cost-effective applications.

Combined with the preconfigured ARCsound audio subsystem, Sonic's EAS technology, including Midi synthesis, provides SoC designers with a pre-integrated and validated, high quality audio solution that offers the lowest die size and power consumption in its class.

A typical ARCsound configuration requires as few as 75,000 gates, consumes as much as 55% less system power and is up to 30% smaller compared with competitive solutions.

EAS technology from Sonic Network is a compact and scalable audio synthesis platform comprising a General Midi synthesiser, matched wavetable soundsets and audio extensions for multiple ringtone formats and audio effects such as multiband equalisation, 3D enhancement, reverb and high frequency enhancement and chorus.

The EAS technology provides a scalable architecture with polyphony from eight to 128-plus voices and sampling rates from 8 to 44kHz.

As Sonic Network produces all its wavetables in-house in its own recording studios, EAS users gain the advantage of being able to specify a wavetable to their exact size, sampling frequency, instrumentation and voicing needs.

Most importantly for embedded use, Sonic's EAS technology is capable of providing high quality audio synthesis in a low footprint with memory requirements from 50Kbyte (including the wavetable), coupled with very low power consumption.

Sonic's EAS technology on the ARCsound subsystem supports the following open standards: General Midi Level 1 (GM1); Midi Type 0 and Midi Type 1; General Midi Lite (GML); Mobile DLS (mDLS); Scalable Polyphony Midi (SP-Midi); Synthetic Mobile Application Format (SMAF) including ADPCM; and Downloadable Sounds (DLS) and Mobile Downloadable Sounds (mDLS).

"There is a distinguished and growing list of companies who are using ARC's configurable technology to design high-volume mobile devices", said Jennifer Hruska, founder and President of Sonic Network.

"As Midi continues to proliferate through the embedded industry as the emergent standard for mobile devices, this partnership allows designers of ARC-based applications access to a robust, high quality audio synthesis solution".

Dan Davis, Director of Multimedia Solutions for ARC International, said: "ARC's application-specific subsystems offer licensees a preconfigured solution of must-have technology critical to the design of media-intensive consumer devices".

"By partnering with industry leaders such as Sonic, we can offer optimised audio technology that meets any design requirement or codec standard".

"This dramatically reduces our customers' overall design effort and gets their ARC-based products to market more quickly".

The ARCsound audio subsystem is a preconfigured, licensable audio platform for use in high volume SoC designs.

The ARCsound subsystem includes state-of-the-art audio codec software, a preconfigured ARC processor with custom audio extensions and a full suite of hardware and software development tools.

The ARCsound subsystem meets stringent quality requirements for cost-sensitive, high-volume markets.

The ARCsound audio subsystem is already shipping to customers and is available now from ARC International.

Embedded Audio Synthesis is available directly from Sonic Network for the ARCsound audio subsystem and for future ARC multimedia subsystems.

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