What are the representative products of good smart speaker chip makers?

With the popularity of the smart speaker market, the shipment volume of smart speaker chip manufacturers has also multiplied several times. What are the larger smart speaker chip manufacturers on the market now? What is their representative product? Xiao Bian this Inventory for everyone.

MediaTek - MT8516

In the mobile phone processor market, MediaTek has been struggling under the pressure of the US Qualcomm, and a series of negative news such as the decline in revenue and the massive layoffs have been followed. However, in the smart speaker chip market, MediaTek is proud of the fact that it is reported that nearly 80% of the smart speaker market in 2016 was supplied by them.

In fact, as early as three years ago, Amazon released the first smart speaker Echo, MediaTek is already a supplier to Amazon. After this year's MediaTek 2017 shareholder meeting, the company’s chairman, Cai Ming Jie, said: “MediaTek is one of the leading chip makers of the Amazon smart speaker Echo, accounting for more than half of the shipment share.”

During the Google I/O Developer Conference in May this year, MediaTek also introduced a single-chip system designed specifically for smart voice assistant devices and smart speaker products, the MT8516, with the intention of further consolidating its leading position in the field of smart speaker chips. status.

The MT8516 supports a quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A35TM clocked at 1.3GHz. The chip also has built-in WiFi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0, which not only ensures a smaller chip footprint, but also helps terminal manufacturers to simplify design, accelerate time-to-market, and provide more creative products for development. More likely.

The MT8516 supports up to 8 channels of TDM microphone array interface and 2 channels of PDM digital microphone interface, making it ideal for far-field microphone voice control and smart audio equipment. In addition, the chip also provides a variety of memory specifications, including LPDDR2, LPDDR3, DDR3, DDR3L and DDR4, to meet a variety of platform requirements.

Qualcomm - Smart Audio Platform

Seeing that the old rival MTK is in the smart speaker market, Qualcomm will naturally not behave without action. In June of this year, in a developer event in Shenzhen, Qualcomm officially launched its "Smart Audio Platform". On this platform, Qualcomm provided two new system-on-chips (SoCs) based on the Opteron 425 (APQ8017) chip and the Opteron 212 chip (APQ8009) that were optimized for audio processing.

In addition to the chip itself, the new platform also provides developers with more development tools, the purpose is very clear, that is, developers want to use these tools to quickly create a similar hardware product like Amazon Echo. The two new chips will provide support for two voice assistants, Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa; they can also support voice recognition, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

In basic music playback, Qualcomm also made some new improvements. The new amplifier technology was deployed on another system-level chip CSRA6620 and a new voice development kit aimed at high-end audio products such as audio and headphones. In addition, Qualcomm has previously called the AllPlay program, allowing users to play the same song in multiple rooms through streaming synchronization, or to play different music in different rooms through partitions. Both models are aimed at smart audio system-level chips and support Google’s previously launched IoT system Android Things and Linux, which are expected to be available in the third quarter of this year.

It seems that Qualcomm has helped developers who want to become smart speakers save a lot of projects. The ultimate goal is to make a chip business. It wants to win more orders than Google and Apple, but may be like an Android phone. Vendor: Want to design and manufacture smart audio into a business similar to Android smart phones.

Intel - Smart Home Hub

Previously, Intel missed the smart phone chip market due to sluggish movements, allowing Qualcomm and MediaTek to gain a monopoly, and has been frowning in the field of mobile chips. Now Intel is also starting to force smart speaker market.

At the Amazon Developers Conference at the end of last year, Intel stated that it will develop smart speakers based on Amazon's Alexa's "Smart Home Hub" (in Chinese meaning "smart home hub"). Intel is a chip-based company that has developed this smart speaker in order to promote its own chip products. The company said in a statement that Intel’s prototype reference design will help external hardware vendors accelerate development of various Alexa-based voice devices and use Intel’s chip platform. According to reports, this smart speaker will support a wealth of network connections, including Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, Zigbee, Bluetooth and so on.

According to a report in May this year, Microsoft announced at the Build Developer Conference that Xiao Na’s equipment was supported by Hewlett-Packard and Intel. However, it is still unknown which company will eventually manufacture hardware products. According to Microsoft, it signed a cooperation agreement with Hewlett-Packard to produce products and signed a cooperation agreement with Intel to provide a reference platform for Xiao Na’s equipment.

Apple - A8

At the WWDC in June of this year, Apple officially released HomePod, which integrates Siri's smart speakers. It will serve as a center to connect the entire Apple smart home. Apple's product is capricious, HomePod built-in powerful A8 processor, it's computing speed is actually the same as the iPhone 6, which can complete the sound field settings, noise reduction and voice recognition work. The bottom of the HomePod is equipped with 7 arrays of precision beam cavities and uses SIRI for voice interaction.

Conexant - AudioSmart

Conexant, for most consumers in China, even for many insiders, is a rather unfamiliar name. However, the customers of Conexant mentioned that they have made a success, Amazon, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, SK Telecom, Korea Telecom and Harman. In addition, China’s partners include LeTV, Midea’s, Gree’s, HKUST’s news, go out to ask questions, Yun Zhisheng, Roobo and so on.

Founded in 1999, Conexant, formerly known as Rockwell Semiconductor, has an important IP portfolio and embedded software in DSP, analog and mixed-signal technologies. For example, Conexant has leading technologies in denoising, echo cancellation, active noise reduction, far-field voice processing, virtual personal assistants, and voice control.

Among them, Conexant's best-known product is the AudioSmart voice solution, which includes dual-microphone arrays and four-microphone arrays. Saleel Awsare, President of Conexant, once stated that its dual microphones can achieve the results of a 5-8 microphone solution from their friends, which is enough to meet the needs of most products on the market.

In 2016, Conexant became Amazon's partner in voice interaction. In December of the same year, Conexant announced a AudioSmart development kit tailored for Alexa Voice Service (AVS). Since 2017, Conexant has captured three BAT companies. In July of this year, Baidu DuerOS adopted Conexant's voice solution; Ali's newly launched Tmall Genius smart speaker also has the shadow of Conexant. It is reported that Tencent has a named "ears" smart speakers will be released in August, if nothing else, equipped with the same Conexant AudioSmart voice solutions.

Quan Zhi Technology - R16 Chip

As early as 2015, JD.com’s smart speaker integrated with the audio assistant of HKUST’s voice-enabled assistants used the R16 chip (Cortex-A7 quad-core architecture) from the domestic chip maker Quan Zhi Technology. In March of last year (2016), HKUST launched the 4+1 ring five-microphone array, which is also used in the R16 platform.

Quan Zhi R16 uses a very cost-effective quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 architecture processor, has a powerful computing performance and a wealth of interfaces; support for Linux-based open source system Tina, (Tina is Quanzhi science and technology to build specifically for the entire The system software brand of the intelligent hardware platform) supports various network application protocols such as AirPlay, DLNA, Qplay, Airkiss, and Smart Link; provides unique algorithms and IP packages, enabling developers to focus on their own applications and product market operations , Reduce product development costs and shorten the development cycle.

Rockchip - RK3036, RK3229

In April 2017, China's Rockchip Microelectronics announced two "AI voice assistant" chip-level solutions at the Hong Kong Electronics Show: two chips, RK3036 and RK3229, aimed at entry-level and mid-to-high-end voice intelligent speakers. Program. And in the first quarter of this year has begun shipping. On May 17th, at Google I/O Developer Conference, Rockchip took the lead in publishing the RK3229 Google Assistant (Google Assistant) solution based on the Android system platform. The cooperation between Rockchip and Google is slowly inciting this market.

According to official data, the RK3036 is based on the Cortex-A7 dual-core and supports 1/2/4Mic; the RK3229 is based on the Cortex-A7 quad-core and supports 4-8Mic. In terms of speech algorithms, it supports sound source localization, sound source enhancement, echo cancellation, and noise suppression technology. The RK3229 is also the first chip solution to support 8-channel digital I2S digital silicon direct connection, which not only greatly saves costs, but also is compatible with different microphone array algorithms and platforms.

Violet highlights - RDA5981

Vibrant and fast-paced market is also fast paced. Currently, smart speaker products equipped with the company's chips have been shipped on a large scale, and the market for low-end smart speakers under 300 yuan has been vigorously harvested. In a media report, Zeng Rui’s spokesperson said: “At present, there are about dozens of our speaker customers, mainly smart and Bluetooth speakers within 300 yuan. The price of the chips is very competitive.”

Radiac's RDA 5981, with a 40nm process and built-in ARM Cortex-M4 processor, is a fully-integrated, low-power WiFi chip built for smart homes, smart homes, and intelligent voice interactions.

The RDA5981 supports 802.11 b/g/n HT20/40 mode and integrates the ARM CortexM4 internally, providing developers with high-capacity configurable chip available memory (SRAM) while also supporting external PSRAM, and a set of expansion interfaces (I2S/ UART/PWM/I2C/SDMMC/USB2.0/SDIO, etc.) can be directly connected to sensors, off-chip Codec, etc.

At the same time, the MPU/FPU is integrated, and hardware acceleration engines such as RSA/AES/TRNG are implemented, which can meet the design requirements of various advanced security functions of the Internet of Things products. The chip fully supports Sharp's "platform" architecture, and can be programmed and developed in environments such as Mbed and FreeRTOS, including a complete set of communication protocols and mainstream cloud protocols, thereby greatly reducing the difficulty of chip development and application.

The above content is a good smart speaker chip maker for everyone to inventory. Voice is one of the most important entrances to smart homes. Smart speakers have naturally become the focus of the giants' beach-going layout, and the smart speaker chip market has also been driven.

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