Family of audio codecs deliver active noise cancellation

29th May 2019

Lanna Deamer

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Dialog Semiconductor has announced a family of highly integrated audio codec chips that deliver Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), the DA740x product provides optimal audio performance in any environment to the rapidly-growing wireless headphones market. The global market for wireless headphones is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 20% generating revenues of around $34bn by 2024. With ANC rapidly becoming a de facto standard, Dialog is well-positioned to capture a market share with the DA740x family.

The DA740x supports feedforward and feedback ANC topologies, in which the noise cancelling microphones are located either outside or inside the headphone cup.

With its integrated custom filtering, the DA740x also enables a fully hybrid implementation which combines the best of both worlds by providing high performance ANC while maximising audio quality and battery life. The chip family is agnostic to the type of audio interface meaning it is effective in both wired and wireless applications.

DA740x’s digital implementation and complementary software-based tuning tools enable Dialog customers to realise their ANC designs with far fewer external components and faster time-to-market compared to typical analogue-based designs, which require significant analogue circuitry and component-level tuning.

“This new, groundbreaking audio codec family is expected to significantly grow Dialog’s share in the expanding wireless headphone market,” said Sean McGrath, Senior VP & GM of Dialog Semiconductor’s Connectivity and Audio Business Group.

“The highly integrated design approach affords our customers superior ANC performance and audio quality with fewer external components and a footprint of less than six square millimeters making it suitable for even the smallest in-ear formfactors. The DA740x allows manufacturers to build higher quality, lower power products in smaller devices with a faster time-to-market.”

The family consists of three chips:

DA7402: stereo high performance (HP) codec with ANC
DA7401: mono HP codec with ANC
DA7400: stereo HP codec.

Dialog has specifically designed each chip to address different segments of the headphone market providing customers with a one-stop-shop for optimising their entire mid and high end product range.

The DA7402 supports hybrid, feedforward, and feedback topologies, up to 35dB suppression, and offers dedicated calibration and tuning tools, all to support digital ANC. With high performance playback and record paths, DA7402 is designed for high dynamic range and minimum latency.

The DA7402 offers one of the smallest digital ANCs on the market, with half the power consumption and twice the audio performance compared to today’s leading chip solutions making it suitable for sport earbuds, hearables, True Wireless Stereo (TWS) earbuds, unified communication headsets and more.

As a derivative of the DA7402, the DA7401 is a high performance mono ANC Codec designed for TWS and hearable applications. It offers a 115dB playback dynamic range, 103dB record dynamic range, hybrid ANC and flexible clocking architecture. The DA7400 provides similar capabilities and was designed for consumer applications that require high resolution, high performance audio, without ANC.

Dialog will be presenting further details on the DA740x family at Computex Taipei 2019, on 29th May at the Taipei International Convention Center.