Digital Audio

Speaker management system

This project is based on the latest SHARC processor by Analog Devices (ADSP-21369) with a clock of 266 MHz and several audio-oriented peripherals (multichannel ASRC, AES/EBU interface); the accurate design and PCB layout resulted in an outstanding signal-to-noise ratio. All phases of the design (design, PCB layout, algorithm development) have been handled internally. A small footprint and high-end audio quality was required.

DSP + FireWire card

This product has been designed under request and is now in production.

For more information, please visit the product home page at http://xspat.aegweb.com/

It fits inside a high-end digital audio converters, and provides: a cluster of floating-point DSPs implementing spatialization algorithms; an IEEE-1394 interface with ASIO drivers for both Mac OS X and Windows XP; a physical MIDI interface for stand-alone operation. The board handles a total of 32 audio channels at 24-bit, with sample rates ranging from 44.1 kHz to 96 kHz. ZP Engineering has taken care of the full design, including firmware and DSP algorithms, as well a full-featured production test setup.
Debugging has been performed with host-based Visual Basic and Tcl applications (see the DSP Application Day paper in the news section).
In this project, the key partnerships with Analog Devices and BridgeCo have been fully deployed.

Low-cost fixed-point DSP card

This board is one of the many designs currently being developed based on the BlackFin DSP by Analog Devices; the board features a high-quality audio conversion section, capable of running at 44.1 kHz up to 96 kHz. The whole audio system can be fully controlled via the asynchronous serial port with a dedicated protocol

DSP boards for validation

A series of digital audio designs have been completed using custom DSP processors. The designs range from general development platforms to validation systems for specific algorithms.
The system on the left has been used for validation of multichannel audio decoding algorithms; for this reason, a complete set of interfaces (SPDIF/IEC958 digital I/O, 6 analog input channels, stereo output, SMC & MMC multimedia cards, local USB interface) has been provided.

The DSP board, loaded with audio decoding algorithms, has been sent to licensing companies for certification.

Quad SHARC PCI card

A high-performance multi-DSP card has been designed for spatialization applications. It is based on two clusters, each with two ADSP-21065L SHARC floating-point DSPs and with local SDRAM. To optimize component placement, processors have been positioned on both sides of the board.

A high-performance PCI interface has been provided along with relevant drivers for Windows 95/98/NT/2000; access to the two separate clusters and data reformatting of digital audio data streams are handled directly by the FPGA. External audio interfaces are available in Alesis ADAT LightPipe format, thus offering a total of 8 inputs and 8 outputs at 24 bit, 48 kHz.

System test has been performed with the Tcl scripting language, allowing complete testing in a few days.