Tensilica Adds AMR WB+ Audio / Speech Decoder and Encoder to HiFi 2 Audio Processor Software Library

“AMR Wideband+ takes the AMR Wideband speech capabilities into the quality levels of stereo music players,” stated Larry Przywara, Tensilica’s director of mobile multimedia. “We expect that our customers using AMR Wideband will upgrade to this enhanced standard because it allows them to mix speech and music in a low bit rate format. We collaborated with our partner P-Product on the development of the decoder and encoder based on the previously released AMR Wideband codec.”

“By utilizing the very efficient HiFi 2 ISA (instruction set architecture) and C programming model, we were able to quickly extend the AMR Wideband codec to incorporate the features of AMR Wideband+,” stated Michael Vulikh, P-Product’s CEO. “The achieved efficiency makes it ideal for portable device manufacturers that want one codec for stereo music and speech.”

AMR WB+ delivers high-quality music and speech between music, making it suitable for mixed-content audio applications such a mobile TV broadcasts, podcasts, multimedia streaming, 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) Packet-switched Streaming Service (PSS), Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS), IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) and other applications.

AMR WB+ is an open standard developed by 3GPP, a collaboration of telecom industry and standards groups in Europe for the development of third-generation mobile devices. Tensilica’s implementation has been specifically optimized to perform efficiently on the HiFi 2 Audio processor, requiring just 29 MHz for decode at 48 Kbps, 48 KHz.

Tensilica’s HiFi 2 audio processor is specifically optimized to efficiently run over 50 audio software packages, including aacPlus, MP3, SRS TruSurround HD, WMA, SPIRIT DSP’s Voice Engine, and the complete suites of Dolby and DTS codecs required for STB and Blu-ray Disc applications.