Wearable technology has become increasingly prevalent in the consumer markets, with smart glasses emerging as a particularly flourishing field. The customer was designing their second iteration of smart glasses and sought help enhancing their audio capabilities.
The customer came across various problems with the product, including the implementation of an Audio DSP featuring three distinct modes: Phone call, Playback, and Voice Assistant. Additionally, challenges involved schematic and layout design for audio components, ensuring a loud and clear speaker, integrating high-quality microphones with beamforming capability, achieving extremely low power consumption, and accommodating small cavities for acoustics and integrated circuits. The customer also lacked expertise in Audio DSP and acoustic design.
Sasken analyzed customer needs and proposed various options. After discussions, we settled on a single audio DSP chipset with an integrated speaker amplifier, minimizing PCB space. This chipset featured multicore DSP for voice assistants and other algorithms like microphone beamforming. Two low-power, high-performance microphones were selected. Despite the challenge of integrating a speaker with small acoustic cavities, careful design and DSP tuning ensured sufficient output.
The customer received comprehensive audio and acoustic design support from Sasken. The second variant proved successful, meeting all the customer's defined requirements. The speaker exhibited increased volume and clarity, while the multimicrophone system with beamforming significantly enhanced noise cancellation for both uplink and voice assistant usage. The utilization of advanced audio DSP algorithms and tuning not only enhanced overall performance but also allows for seamless updates to meet future needs.