Consumers in today's demanding market are always looking for their audio devices to do more. Better audio clarity, more storage capacity, ease of use, portability and longer battery life are just some of the challenges posed by end-users to the silicon designers of today. ARM enables audio product manufacturers to meet these demands through an ideal combination of a wide range of leading processors and an audio software ecosystem enabling possibilities including ranging from simple speech playback to high end surround sound. This excellent combination of processor and software offerings is driving a widespread shift in the audio market from specialized DSPs to ARM processors. The software offerings through the ARM Connected Community include products like codecs for standards like MP3 and GSM AMR, enhancements like echo cancellation and reverberation, post processing solutions for mixing and filtering, 3D positional audio, digital radio products and many others. As audio requirements continue to evolve and adapt to consumer needs, ARM continues to offer a wide range of possibilities with a combination of leading processor architectures and strong partnerships with leading software vendors. Choosing the right audio processor Embedded audio design can be broadly categorized into three use case scenarios, each one of which is well served by ARM's diverse processor portfolio. All audio functionality could be handled by a dedicated design subsystem. Depending upon requirements, this approach has quite a few advantages including uninterrupted audio, efficient power management and ease of design. For example, a system could have two ARM9E processors, using the main ARM926EJ-S platform for filtering, copy protection, stream analysis and post processing and a low-cost, low power implementation of a dedicated ARM968E-S for basic audio playback functionality. Another design choice could be to run all audio on the main processor in the design, using its capabilities over and above that required for the main functionality. This range of applications, workload and requirement bandwidth could also be very wide. Cortex-M3 based MCU parts available in the market today can perform basic control functionality and MP3 decode comfortably. At the same time, if the requirement is to handle application processing for a high end mobile phone and also significant audio enhancements and post-processing then a Cortex-A series processor would be more appropriate. The third choice could be to scale the audio workload between the processors in the system dynamically. This approach has the potential to optimize around the power and performance bottlenecks in the design and split the audio workload across a multicore processor. ARM MPCore technology is ideally suited for this kind of usage scenario where a scaleable multicore processor can dynamically supply the performance required for advanced scenarios while maximizing power efficiency during simple audio playback. The various benefits ARM processors bring to embedded audio are outlined below | Processor | Major benefits for audio design | | ARM7 Family | Perfect low-cost silicon choice for a majority of audio applications | | ARM9E Family | Excellent performance with DSP instructions and single-cycle MAC | | ARM11 Family | All ARM9E family benefits + additional performance of SIMD | | Cortex-M3 | Efficient audio processing for MCU class devices | | Cortex-R4 | Thumb-2 DSP instructions for highest in-class efficiency | | Cortex-A8 | Superscalar performance and NEON for high-end multimedia | | Cortex-A9 | Most efficient use of available resources through multiprocessing |
Choosing the right audio codec The choice of audio codec to run on an ARM processor is an important decision and the availability of products for the intended audio standard is paramount to quick time to market. There are more than 20 partners in the ARM Connected Community offering leading codec products which enable fast design cycles for audio applications on ARM processors. The most important criteria in choosing a codec for your application include its performance, which could have major ramifications on your system design and memory requirements, which could have a significant impact on total cost. The audio software partners in the ARM Connected Community offer products with compelling performance and very low memory requirements. Audio software availability on ARM For detailed information on codec availability on ARM, please view the Audio Codecs page. Applications Portable Media Players
Mobile Phones
Digital Photo Frames
Automotive Infotainment
Set-top Boxes
Niche applications ( Eg: ARM9 based LiveScribe) Back to Top | 
