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Decoders have all surround-sound standards covered

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Mar 7, 2003

Yamaha has developed two new digital surround decoder LSIs and will begin sample shipments next week.

Yamaha has developed two new digital surround decoder LSIs and will begin sample shipments next week.

The ultra-low-power YSS942 and YSS941 can be applied to a whole range of surround-sound components, from high-end A/V amplifiers to popular home theatre in a box systems.

The development of these two products coincides with the global proliferation of DVD players and the start of BS digital broadcasting in Japan, both of which make use of surround sound technologies.

The two new decoder chips, which are compatible with all relevant broadcasting technologies are expected to be popular with consumer electronics companies for a wide range of end-user products.

Yamaha projects initial sales at a million units per year.

The YSS942/941 is a digital surround decoder LSI for A/V amplifiers and other home theatre components with an integrated architecture that can decode Dolby Digital, DTS and every other existing digital surround format by using one chip.

The device is based on 0.15-micron process technology, and features a high-precision floating point DSP core newly developed by the company.

In addition, all the codes for decoding every existing digital surround processing format are built in as ROM, and with working RAM handling other necessary processes, the YSS942/941 minimises the amount of packaging required by components.

Even with a high-speed working frequency of 180MHz, noise from signal bleed is negligible and digital signal processing is pure because built-in ROM and RAM allow high-speed signal lines to remain confined within the chip.

The YSS942/941 incorporates a variety of functions on one chip for a digital surround LSI that makes fully integrated usage possible.

An auto-detector built in as hardware intelligently activates the decoder that corresponds to the format of the signal being inputted and begins decoding.

Bass management is also built into the architecture.

It handles optional successive processing for sound field DSP, headphone DSP and other functions by using the processing capacity remaining after digital sound decoding is complete.