Tokyo--Toshiba Corporation today announced a new series of digital signal processors that support a wide range of audio compression formats, including those used in silicon audio players, DVD players and TVs. Samples will be available in October at ¥2,000 (US$17) and mass production will follow in November, at an initial volume of 100,000 a month.

Toshiba's new DSPs can be incorporated in decoders for MP3 and AAC (2 ch) sources, compression formats widely used in Internet audio downloads, and in decoders supporting Dolby Digital (AC-3 2ch, 5.1ch), the Digital Theater System (dts) used in DVD and other audio-visual systems, and Dolby ProLogic. The new lineup includes the first single-chip DSP solution supporting decoding of both the AAC (2 ch) and MP3 compression formats.

Recent innovations in digital audio compression formats have seen impressive gains, to the point where near-CD quality output can be obtained from a music file containing 1/10 or even less data than the equivalent CD version. Files in these formats can be downloaded files from the Internet for storage on hard drives and transferred to flash-memory-based portable audio players that are smaller than an MD player. The market for such players is expected to grow rapidly in coming years, as increasingly high-density flash-memory cards become available and the Internet becomes a major medium for music distribution. Toshiba's new DSP provides optimized support for this promising market.

Product Outlines

* External SRAM (1Mbit) is required for dts decoding * Use of these products requires licenses from the compression format developers.

Main Features

1. Support for decoding AAC2ch, MP3, Dolby Digital (AC-3 2ch, 5.1ch), Dolby Pro Logic and dts and other compression formats; surround sound support.
2. Faster processing speed (four times that of previous model) and lower power consumption (half of the previous model).
3. Multiple applications can be programmed into the chip, up to the limits of total memory capacity. 1Mbit of external SRAM (maximum) can be used as a data RAM.
4. Functions such as digital filters, sound-field control for hall simulations, an equalizer and dynamic range controls can be integrated.

Main Specifications

* "Dolby," AC-3" and "Pro Logic" are registered trademarks of Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation. * "dts" is registered trademarks of Digital Theater Systems, Inc.