Synopsys' DesignWare Audio IP Achieves First-Pass Silicon Success in Leading 65-nm and 55-nm Process Technologies

The DesignWare 96 dB Hi-Fi Audio IP portfolio offers a comprehensive feature set, such as line and microphone inputs, headset, loudspeaker and line driver outputs, programmable gain amplifiers and power management blocks. This allows designers to select the specific functionality for their target application, resulting in area and power savings. Synopsys' audio IP family of audio codecs, including both record channel analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and playback channel digital-to-analog converters (DACs), achieves excellent silicon performance with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in excess of 100 dB for the playback channel and 94 dB for the record channel. In addition, the DesignWare Audio IP delivers audio pop-suppression performance of -80 dBV with flexible start-up/down timing control for a high-quality audio experience.

There is a growing inclination among chip vendors to integrate high-performance multimedia functionality into their SoC designs to achieve better audio/video and graphics performance, while keeping power consumption at an optimum level, said Ganesh Ramamoorthy, research director at Gartner. We expect differentiated IP such as general purpose analog and analog mixed-signal IP will continue to grow at a CAGR of over 9% over the next five years. IP vendors who are providing feature-rich Hi-Fi audio IP solutions will play a key role in the development of SoCs requiring audio processing. (See: ID Number: G00213215/26 May 2011).

For the past 15 years, Synopsys has delivered high-quality audio IP that has been successfully integrated in more than 100 million chips, said John Koeter, vice president of marketing for IP and Systems at Synopsys. We continue to expand our DesignWare Analog IP portfolio with silicon-proven solutions that support the latest process technologies and offer a range of functions that can be quickly embedded into advanced SoCs.