White Papers
Technical deep-dives on topics of interest written by DSP Concepts experts

Achieving Maximum Audio Processing Throughput on the Latest Chipsets
Automotive audio systems continue to grow in complexity with an ever-increasing set of use cases. System architectures must now consider not only playback processing, but also telephony, voice control, safety sounds, individual sound zones, and even road noise cancellation. These use cases require huge compute resources that must be distributed across multiple cores. This paper explores the audio processing throughput of the latest standalone automotive DSPs and multicore SOCs with integrated DSPs. The effects of caching, memory architecture, and multicore are presented and demonstrate how to configure an automotive audio system for maximum audio processing throughput.

Advancing Always-On Voice Command Systems with Ultra-Low Power Solutions
A Comprehensive Guide to Voice Command Systems in Portable and Battery-Powered Products, including the top applications and use cases for always-on voice command, the potential challenges preventing always-on voice command in portable and battery-powered products, the core hardware requirements, and the software algorithms that enable always-on voice command.

Designing Optimized Microphone Beamformers
Our previous paper, “Fundamentals of Voice UI,” explained the algorithms and processes required for a voice UI system. In this paper, we demonstrate how the different microphone types and array configurations affect performance of voice UI systems, and make specific recommendations engineers and product design teams can use to get the best performance from their voice UI products.

Fundamentals of Voice UI
Voice UI–or voice user interface–features found in the Amazon Echo and Google Home have captured the attention of consumers. This paper outlines the basic concerns product developers face when creating and optimizing voice UI products; examines ways of measuring and evaluating them; and recommends best practices in voice UI systems engineering.

How Digital Signal Processing Can Enhance the Utility and Performance of Microphones
Smartphones and the Internet of Things have made microphones much more vital in today’s technology. In this paper, the author describes a technology for digital processing of microphone signals that requires no coding skills or DSP expertise.

How a Graphical Audio Development Tool Can Simplify Embedded Audio Product Creation
Audio products are becoming more complex, as are consumers’ expectations of them. Creating these products—from concept to R&D and tuning—can be difficult and time-consuming. In this paper, we will discuss the challenges in the product creation phases and explain how the combination of a graphical audio development tool with a low-power image processing DSP can transform what has long been an inefficient process.

How to shorten and simplify your embedded development cycle - Part 2
With the right process and tool, it is possible to cut audio DSP software development process by 90% of the time. In this paper, you will see how that can be done.

How to shorten and simplify your embedded development cycle
Learn how traditional ways of developing embedded audio projects is no longer suitable in a fast moving world with ever shortening product cycles and customers that demand higher quality innovations.

Audio Weaver® Testimonial from Sennheiser
Here is an interview conducted with Dan Harris, Chief Technology Officer with Sennheiser. Sennheiser has adopted Audio Weaver® as a platform across all their product divisions.

Automotive Audio using the Atmel SAMV7
This presentation was given at the Embedded World Conference in Nuremberg in 2015. We present an 8 channel automotive audio system based on the Atmel SAMV7 processor. The SAMV7 is an ARM Cortex-M7 processor running at 300 MHz and is sufficient for most low- to mid-level automotive audio systems.

Choosing the best processor for your audio product
This is the presentation made at the AES 2014 Conference at the product developer's track. This paper contains benchmarking information for the different processors. There is some surprising results with the new ARM Cortex-M4 and M7 microcontrollers as well as how much can be achieved on the Cortex-A processors. This will help you choose the best processor when developing your audio product.

Developing High-Quality Audio for Consumer Electronics Applications using a single MCU – STM32
Presents the Audio Weaver® reference design based on the STM32 Cortex-M4 processor. Suitable for multimedia speakers, headphones, and docking stations.