The global market for wireless headphones is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 20% generating revenues of around $34 billion by 2024. Consumers are looking for high quality audio, active noise cancellation and more, all within smaller, sleeker headphones. With ANC rapidly becoming a de facto standard, Dialog is well-positioned to capture a significant market share with the DA740x product family of audio codecs, introduced at the Computex 2019 show in Taiwan.
The new product family - consisting of the DA7402, a stereo high performance (HP) codec with ANC; the DA7401, a mono HP codec with ANC; and the DA7400 stereo HP codec - was specifically designed to address different segments of the headphone market, offering manufacturers a one-stop-shop for optimizing their entire mid and high-end product range.
The DA740x chips support feedforward and feedback ANC topologies, in which the noise cancelling microphones are located either outside or inside the headphone cup. With its integrated custom filtering, the DA740x also enables a fully hybrid implementation which combines the best of both worlds by providing high performance ANC while maximizing audio quality and battery life. The chip family is agnostic to the type of audio interface meaning it is effective in both wired and wireless applications.
The digital implementation and complementary software-based tuning tools available enable manufacturers to realize their ANC designs with far fewer external components and faster time-to-market compared to typical analog-based designs, which require significant analog circuitry and component-level tuning.
"This new, groundbreaking audio codec family is expected to significantly grow Dialog’s share in the expanding wireless headphone market,” says Sean McGrath, Senior VP & GM of Dialog Semiconductor’s Connectivity and Audio Business Group. “The highly integrated design approach affords our customers superior ANC performance and audio quality with fewer external components and a footprint of less than six square millimeters making it suitable for even the smallest in-ear formfactors. The DA740x allows manufacturers to build higher quality, lower power products in smaller devices with a faster time-to-market.”
Dialog has specifically designed each one of the DA740x three chips to address different design requirements. The DA7402 supports hybrid, feedforward, and feedback topologies, up to 35 dB suppression, and offers dedicated calibration and tuning tools, all to support digital ANC. With high performance playback and record paths, the DA7402 is designed for high dynamic range and minimum latency, and offers one of the smallest digital ANCs on the market, with half the power consumption and twice the audio performance compared to today’s leading chip solutions. This makes the DA7402 ideal for sport earbuds, hearables, true wireless stereo (TWS) earbuds, unified communication headsets and more.
As a derivative of the DA7402, the DA7401 is a high-performance mono ANC Codec designed for TWS and hearable applications. It offers a 115 dB playback dynamic range, 103 dB record dynamic range, hybrid ANC and flexible clocking architecture. The DA7400 provides similar capabilities and was designed for consumer applications that require hi-resolution, high performance audio, without ANC.
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