The Future of MEMS Directional Microphones Goes Digital: Soundskrit Announces the SKR0410

Soundskrit, the Canadian company determined to evolve MEMS microphones for consumer electronics, announced the availability of its second product, the SKR0410, touted as the world’s first digital directional MEMS microphone. The SKR0410 brings the latest innovations in MEMS and acoustic transducer design to the digital domain to enable directional audio capture in consumer devices of all form factors.

Nordic Semiconductor has used the latest trade shows globally to showcase its latest low power wireless solutions, and introduced a series of new development solutions targeting Bluetooth LE Audio. At the Embedded World Exhibition that took place in Nuremberg, Germany, Nordic offered demonstrations of its new nRF5340 Audio Development Kit (DK), a design platform for rapid development of LE Audio products, and the Nordic Thingy:53 a rapid prototyping solution, both based on Nordic’s nRF5340 SoC.

TDK introduced new digital MEMS microphones as part of its SmartSound family of products for mobile, TWS, and other consumer devices, providing advanced feature sets in small package footprints. The T5848 offers the highest dynamic range with I2S direct audio connectivity to a wide variety of SoCs, MCUs and IoT processors. And TDK also introduced the T5828 MEMS microphone with MIPI SoundWire functionality, adding 68dBA SNR and Acoustic Activity Detect features with always-on ultra-low power mode.

TDK introduced three new MEMS microphones as part of the SmartSound family of products for mobile and consumer connected devices. The new TDK T5919 is a high performance PDM digital MEMS microphone and is the first with built in particle ingress filter (PIF) for harsh environments. The new T3903 is a high performance PDM digital MEMS microphone with very low power and wide dynamic range, while the also T4086 is an analog output MEMS microphone in a tiny package, ideal for very space constrained applications.

Among the many interesting demonstrations of new audio solutions for developers presented by TDK at CES 2020, the T5808 MIPI standard SoundWire microphone stands out as a "world's first," using the MIPI Alliance SoundWire compliant digital interface which allows bi-directional data flow. The T5808 is a multi-mode, low noise digital MEMS microphone in a small package, consisting of a MEMS microphone element and an impedance converter amplifier followed by a fourth-order Σ-Δ modulator.