Addressing the market for high-quality audio systems in mid-range pricing, Texas Instruments has unveiled an audio DSP chip that provides low cost with multiple features.
The eight-channel TAS3108 audio DSP has the audio processing capabilities necessary to enable up to 7.1-channel processing in digital TVs and home theater-in-a-box systems, as well as in automotive head units and external amplifiers. It can perform five simultaneous instructions per clock cycle and operates at 135 MHz, providing a maximum of 675 million instructions per second.
The chip's 135 million multiple accumulates per second rate is important for meeting the needs of this market. "We can do one MAC for every clock cycle, which is important because audio requires a lot of filtering and a lot of multiply-accumulate. If you can't do a MAC every clock cycle, you're only doing half the filtering," says Ryan Reynolds, car audio marketing manager for TI.
The chip is aimed at high-value applications where users want fairly high quality, but have limited budgets. That hits the mainstream of a huge field. The audio market rose 29 percent to a record $10.1 billion in 2005, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. While MP3 players drove much of that growth, the CEA notes that after-market automotive systems are a prime example of the increased quality consumers want. Revenues defied the normal trend for pricing cuts electronic products, rising to $2.43 billion even though unit shipments were basically flat.
The line has a 48-bit data path, which improves bass management processing and provides overhead needed to filter high-resolution data. "Incoming DVD-quality audio is 24 bits, so you need additional room for processing. We provide 16 noise bits to do filtering and eliminate noise," Reynolds says.
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 TI's 135 MHz audio processor handles up to eight channels.
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