Audio technology to play big at WinHEC

Electronic News, March 31, 1997 by Andrew MacLellan

San Francisco--Cirrus Logic subsidiary Crystal Semiconductor today will unveil a DSP-based family of audio processors which the company claims integrate Dolby AC-3 Digital Surround Sound, 3-D positional audio and wavetable synthesis on a single chip. Crystal will demonstrate the new line at next week's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) here.

On a related front, Aureal Semiconductor has ported its A3D 3-D positional audio technology to Microsoft's DirectX version 5.0 which will include an open hardware access language (HAL) for 3-D hardware acceleration in DirectSound. Aureal said it has furnished Microsoft with 3-D positional sound software drivers which will be included in the latest version of Microsoft's API to be released to developers in April at the Computer Game Developers Conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Aureal next month also will ship its A3D algorithm in the Diamond Multimedia Systems' Monster Sound add-in card via the ADI 2181 DSP from Analog Devices (EN, March 3).

Aureal's own A3D hardware implementation will be introduced in April. The company said a silicon follow-on is essential to securing a place in the rapidly congealing audio market in order to set it apart from software licensing entities such as SRS Labs and QSound Labs and new entrants into the audio chip business such as VLSI Technology or S3.

"We believe in the long run the partnering of IP and silicon is critical to providing the best solution," said Aureal president/CEO Kip Kokinakis. "That's where we differentiate ourselves from an SRS or a Q-Sound. They were able to get away with uncompressed IP for years, frankly because no one ever called them on it.

"And the computational power required to do what you want as an end user is going to far outstrip MMX for the next several years," Mr. Kokinakis added. "So that means the only way to go is to develop a creative, inventive audio algorithm, and you're just not going to license that off to a bunch of silicon jockeys."

Meanwhile, Crystal Semiconductor joins a host of multimedia companies readying their wares for WinHEC, including Philips Semiconductors, Trident Microsystems, ATI Technologies, S3 and Crystal's parent company, Cirrus Logic, with a claim today of being the first semiconductor company to offer playback of AC-3 and MPEG-2 audio, 3-D positional sound and wavetable synthesis on a single IC.

The Dolby and MPEG-2 specifications are the audio algorithms included in the digital versatile disc (DVD) standard and are widely expected to be used in DVD systems in the consumer market. Hardware 3-D positional sound is being targeted for the PC to enhance the audio in gaming applications, while wavetable audio is replacing FM synthesis for truer reproduction of musical tones.

The entire audio suite is foreseen by Crystal to operate on a single platform eventually.

Austin Texas-based Crystal today will roll out the CS4610 PCI audio accelerator and accompanying firmware for $22 in 10,000-unit quantities. The 100MHz chip, which employs a 300 million instructions-per-second (MIPS) somewhat long instruction multiple data (SLIMD) architecture, will be followed in 1Q98 by a 125MHz 375MIPS device and in 3Q98 by a 150MHz chip Crystal said will be capable of 900MIPS.

While it continues an alliance with audio companies SRS Labs and QSound, both of which are licensing houses for AC-3 and 3-D positional audio algorithms, Crystal's system technology marketing manager, Joe Maurin, said the CS4610 processor's algorithms were developed in-house. The chip features a direct memory access (DMA) engine with scatter-gather support, a just-in-time DMA data requester.

According to Mr. Maurin, the device is also capable of 5.1:2 mapping which takes the six AC-3 audio channels and converts them to play over a pair of standard speakers.

Available in 3Q97 in a 100-pin MQFP package, the device initially will be manufactured on a 0.35-micron process at MiCRUS, a fab Cirrus operates jointly with IBM. The chip will, however, quickly migrate to Cirrus' other joint foundry, a 0.25-micron fab known as Cirent which it runs in cooperation with Lucent Technologies.

The CS4610 supports Microsoft's DirectSound, DirectSound3D and ActiveMovie APIs. A two-chip implementation is available to provide backwards compatibility with legacy ISA bus-based SoundBlaster games.