Wireless Speaker and Audio (WiSA) Association Continues to Expand

Infineon is the latest company to join the Wireless Speaker and Audio (WiSA) Association, the industry group dedicated to bringing high resolution, wireless, multi-channel audio products to the home theater market, assuring interoperability between wireless speakers and components. Infineon joins a strong and extensive list of members, including also GoldenEar, Electrocompaniet, Almando and Primare, as WiSA continues to expand with major audio industry suppliers, manufacturers and speaker brands.

Infineon Technologies announced the acquisition of Merus Audio. The Copenhagen-based start-up, founded in 2010 by Hans Hasselby-Andersen and Mikkel Hoyerby, has developed a new generation of energy-efficient integrated Class D amplifier solutions. Merus Audio amplifiers maximize audio performance and battery playback time for smart home and battery-powered speakers while minimizing heat and design space. Following the company's presentation at CES 2018, Merus generated significant interest in the audio and CE industry in general.

XMOS announced commercial availability of the xCORE VocalFusion Speaker Linear evaluation kit as part of its range of innovative far-field voice capture solutions. Based on the XMOS VocalFusion XVF3100 voice processor, the kit is designed for developers, OEMs and ODMs integrating voice user interfaces into flat, or linear consumer electronics typically found at the “edge of the room”, such as smart home control panels and washing machines.

XMOS' VocalFusion 4-Mic Dev Kit for Amazon Alexa Voice Service (AVS) for far-field applications integrates Infineon’s high SNR MEMS microphones to ensure highest performance and reliability, creating the first Amazon AVS development kit with a linear mic array for far-field applications. The 4-Mic Development Kit features crystal clear voice capturing even in noisy environments. This enables commands to be accurately captured from across the room for processing by the Alexa cloud-based speech recognition system.

XMOS Ltd, a leading vendor in voice capture solutions for the OEM consumer electronics market, has successfully complete a $15M Series-E funding round. The round was led by Infineon Technologies with additional funding from existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, Draper Esprit, Foundation Capital and Robert Bosch Venture Capital. Following previous platform cooperations, Infineon Technologies AG acquired a minority stake in the company, strengthening the strategic partnership.

At Mobile World Congress 2017, Barcelona, Infineon Technologies and XMOS partner to deliver a new building block for voice recognition. It features a combination of Infineon’s BGT60TR24B 60GHz 2Tx/4Rx radar IC with accompanying antenna, 70dB SNR silicon microphone sensors, based on Infineon’s dual backplate MEMS technology, and an audio processor from XMOS. In combination, the solution provides far field voice capture by audio beamforming combined with radar target presence detection.