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Consumer Audio Platform

Overview

Audio is a fundamental feature in today's consumer devices such as mobile audio players, telematics, and a host of home entertainment devices. To deliver the best user experience, consumer devices need to support a wide range of algorithms and often must run them simultaneously.

Employing Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) or hardwired blocks to process audio is the traditional approach. However, the performance attributes of the MIPS family of processors provide an alternative method to resolve the challenges of designing a robust and scalable audio subsystem.

MIPS® Consumer Audio Platform

The MIPS® Consumer Audio Platform consists of the industry's most comprehensive set of audio algorithms for digital consumer devices and the industry standard MIPS32® family of products. The platform allows silicon vendors to standardize on a single audio architecture to service multiple consumer products segments.

The MIPS Consumer Audio Platform offers many advantages to consumers

Requirement	Audio Challenges	MIPS Consumer Audio Platform Advantages
Higher Performance	Consumer applications require scalable audio subsystem to support increasingly complex and evolving algorithms, advanced pre/post processing techniques, and full-duplex encode/decode applications simultaneously.	MIPS Technologies' 32-bit synthesizable cores are the highest performance in the industry (up to 550 MHz for a 24K™ core). This gives silicon vendors the performance headroom needed to support next-generation consumer audio requirements.
Lower Cost	Vendors must reduce SOC costs while continuing to deliver sophisticated applications and services.	Employing a single-processor architecture for audio and host processing reduces development tool investments, design time, and DSP licensing and royalty fees.
Time-To-Market	To maximize revenue opportunities, feature rich devices must be brought to market ahead of the competition.	MIPS Technologies and its partners offer highly optimized audio algorithms to reduce time to market.
Product Differentiation	Products must be able support a wide range of revenue generating services.	An industry standard architecture allows equipment manufactures and service providers to add and customize value added applications and services.

MIPS Consumer Audio Platform Partners

The following codecs are ready for licensing from Fraunhofer, Microsoft, MIPS Technologies or Sonic Solutions.

Audio Vendor	Algorithms
Fraunhofer	MP3 (MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 Layer-3) Decoder MP3 (MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 Layer-3) Encoder AAC (MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Low Complexity AAC) Decoder Multichannel on Request AAC (MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Low Complexity AAC) Encoder Multichannel on Request MPEG-4 AAC Low Delay for Bidirectional Communication, Decoder MPEG-4 AAC Low Delay for Bidirectional Communication, Encoder
Microsoft	Windows Media Audio
MIPS Technologies	Dolby Digital Decoder Dolby Digital Plus Decoder-Converter MP3 Decoder MPEG-2 Layer 1 & 2 Decoder MPEG-2 AAC LC Decoder Dolby Pro Logic II Decoder SRS TruSurround XT
Sonic Solutions	Dolby Digital Encoder