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ARC's Sound-to-Silicon Audio Solutions
Digital TV/Home Theater Audio Solution
ARC’s Integrated Solution Decreases BoM Costs,
Accelerates Time to Market, and Delivers an Immersive
Surround Sound Audio Experience
The ARC® Digital TV and Home Theater solution provides an integrated audio offering to OEM and
semiconductor companies, enabling a compelling home entertainment center experience using
lower cost and/or fewer audio components.
ARC’s solution is vertically integrated and comprises the industry leading Sonic Focus™ audio
enrichment software, optimized ARC Sound Subsystem silicon IP, software development and EDA
tools, a complete library of audio codecs, and mastering tools and services.
Spotlight: ARC’s Sonic Focus™ Audio Enrichment Products
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Sonic Focus
- Restores information lost in compression
- Adds clarity to the entire audio spectrum
- Enhances & preserves original voice tonality
- Limits listener fatigue
- Natural Surround Sound
- Physical modeling of audio sound stage
- No pre-encoding required of any content
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Alternative Approaches
- Does not reduce compression artifacts
- Muffles one frequency to emphasis another
- Alters the tonality of vocals/dialog
- Creates listener fatigue
- “Picket fencing,” narrow “sweet spot”
- Phase differences and delay techniques
- Requires custom surround encoding
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With ARC’s integrated solution, OEMs can cut manufacturing and development costs, reduce time to
market, and eliminate costly audio components such as subwoofers. Acoustical modelling and time-domain
analysis, along with proven product mastering tools and services, help create a natural and
realistic listening experience. Lastly, OEMs can choose from multiple silicon suppliers offering ARC-Based™ chips.
For semiconductor companies, the “Sonic Focus ready” ARC Sound Subsystem offers one of the
lowest power and smallest form factors in the industry. Codecs, drivers, and operating systems
complement the configurable ARC processor in the subsystem, reducing development and test time.
By leveraging the configurable nature of the ARC Sound Subsystem in combination with the scalable
Sonic Focus audio IP, semiconductor customers can design a platform to target multiple audio
applications.
Benefits to OEMs
- A complete audio development and IP solution
- Achieves highest quality sound with the greatest cost savings
- Enables OEMs to develop scalable product platforms to offer consumers a good, better, or best device
- Lowers bill of materials and production costs
- Eliminates need for costly audio components
- Multiple semiconductor companies offering ARC-Based™ chips
Benefits to Chip Suppliers
- Integrated “Sonic Focus ready” solution includes low power 32-bit ARC® Sound Subsystem
- Reduces silicon area and chip development cost by as much as a million dollars
- Ability to easily tailor ARC’s configurable solution for multiple markets
Highlights
ARC® Sonic Focus™ Product Family
- Adaptive Dynamics Refinement System™ (ADRS) overcomes the negative effects of data compression
- X-Matrix™ creates virtual surround sound and improves clarity and definition of vocals
- Extrapolator™ uses acoustical modelling to create 5.1/7.1 channel information from stereo content within ordinary movies, music, and games while increases dynamic impact
- Virtual Bass™ optimizes the bass rendering capabilities of speakers and headphones, creating audio that reflectss the original performance without artificial signals or muffling voice and dialog clarity
ARC® Sound Subsystem
- A mutli-standard, turnkey IP solution designed for easy integration into SoCs
- Based upon a configurable 32-bit ARC 600 processor core
- “Sonic Focus ready”
- Includes DSP XY memory, configurable caches, audio optimized media extensions, software, and development tools
- Capable of multi-stream decoding
- Proven technology used by leading semiconductor companies
Audio Codecs
- AAC-LC
- MP3 low power
- WMA
- aacPlus v2
- Dolby Digital
- Dolby Digital Plus
Proven, Royalty-Free MQX Embedded Operating System
- Tightly coded, high performance, proven real-time OS
- Modular design to minimize ROM and RAM footprint
- C/ASM source code provided for customization and optimization
- Proven in advanced embedded systems designs for years
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