“The combination of Infineon’s high-performance microphones and XMOS’ VocalFusion processors has allowed us to develop very compelling far-field voice capture solutions that, until now, have been difficult to deliver”, says Mark Lippett, President and CEO of XMOS.
Infineon’s microphones provide very low self-noise (69 dB SNR), distinguished microphone to microphone phase and sensitivity matching as well as fast signal conversion for low latency, ensuring excellent hit rate and extended voice pick-up distance for far-field applications.
“The combination of XMOS processing power, algorithm know-how and Infineon’s microphone hardware is a perfect fit for a far-field voice user interface solution for applications using multiple microphones”, comments Dr. Roland Helm, Head of Sensor Business unit at Infineon. “With that, we can meet the expectations of ambitious end users.”
Shortly before the introduction of the VocalFusion 4-Mic Dev Kit for Amazon by XMOS, Infineon Technologies revealed publicly that it was entering the packaged silicon microphone market, addressing the needs for high performance, low noise MEMS microphones. The analog and digital microphones are based on Infineon’s dual backplate MEMS technology and distinguish themselves with a 70 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This is combined with an exceptionally low distortion level of 10 percent at a 135 dB sound pressure level (SPL). In a 4 mm x 3 mm x 1.2 mm MEMS package, the microphones are very well suited for high-quality acoustic recordings and far field voice capturing applications.
“This is an expansion of the established high volume bare die MEMS and ASIC business model with our packaging partners around the world,” explains Dr. Roland Helm, Senior Director and Head of Product Line Sensors for Infineon’s Power Management and Multimarket Division. “We will continue to strengthen and grow our business with our partners with bare dies; additionally we now address low noise high-end use cases with our two new packaged microphones.”
Current MEMS microphone technology uses a sound wave actuated membrane and a static backplate. Infineon’s dual backplate MEMS technology uses a membrane embedded within two backplates thus generating a truly differential signal. This allows improved high frequency immunity for better audio signal processing and increases the acoustic overload point of 10 percent Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) to 135 dB SPL.
The SNR of 70 dB is an improvement of 6 dB compared to a conventional MEMS microphone. This improvement is equivalent to doubling the distance from which a user can give a voice command that is captured by the microphone. Additionally, the analog and digital microphones have excellent microphone-to-microphone matching (±1 dB sensitivity matching and ± 2° phase matching) which is ideal for implementing in arrays. For this reason the MEMS microphones are a perfect fit for ultra-precise beam forming and noise cancelling.
Engineering samples of the low noise packaged analog and digital MEMS microphones are now available and start of production will be in Q1/2018.
The VocalFusion 4-Mic Kit for Amazon AVS (XK-VF3000-L33-AVS) is now available to developers, OEMs, and ODMs from Digi-Key at www.digikey.com/xmos-avs
www.infineon.com/microphones
For more information on the kit, and XMOS XVF3000 devices, visit www.xmos.com/vocalfusion-avs
