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Quality Audio for Low Cost Embedded Products - An Exploration Using Audio Codec ICs - Shree Kumar, Atharva Upadhye - ADCx India 2025
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Designing a decent quality audio solution at a low cost is an important challenge in embedded systems. This is made tricky as the bar for audio quality is set pretty high by everyday consumer products, which rely on highly integrated solutions. Consumer solutions achieve low cost, but that comes with the requirement of high volumes production. Embedded products typically do not scale to such volumes, which is what makes this a challenge.

With microcontroller based solutions, narrowing down the proper choice of components is an iterative process, especially for teams that have not dealt with audio at the lowest levels. The last mile cost optimization can be non-obvious, needing to push things down to clocking architecture.

In this talk, we will walk through a few audio solutions we investigated using audio codec ICs, with various cost/quality tradeoffs: Cirrus Logic WM8758, Princeton Tech PT8211, finally settling on Everest Semiconductor ES8388. The base hardware board is based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, making good use of the PIO peripheral. We will cover essentials such as the I2S interface (master/slave), and codec configuration. We will also explain the clocking architecture (and software implementation) that eliminates the discrete crystal sometimes required for the codec, achieving the lowest cost per board.
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Slides: https://data.audio.dev/talks/ADCxIndia/2025/quality-audio-for-low-cost-embedded-products/slides.pdf
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Shree Kumar

Shree is an embedded software engineer, and an independent consultant, with over two decades of experience across many layers of the system software stack. He headed the software team that designed India's first 3G tablet. Some of his early significant work was in High Performance Computing (HPC) visualization, winning awards at SuperComputing 2007 (SC '07) conference. He also created KitePhone, the world's first DIY 3D printable Android smartphone concept. Shree enjoys long walks and longer bicycle tours. Recently, he has been spending time looking at government policies, especially related to semiconductors.
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Atharva Upadhye

Atharva is an accidental engineer with a background in sports. He has always wanted to work on hardware stuff. He is currently serving time at Samsung Semiconductors, working on SSDs.
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Streamed & Edited by Digital Medium Ltd: https://online.digital-medium.co.uk
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Organized and produced by JUCE: https://juce.com/
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Special thanks to the ADCx India Team:

Sophie Carus
Derek Heimlich
Andrew Kirk
Bobby Lombardi
Tom Poole
Ralph Richbourg
Jim Roper
Jonathan Roper
Prashant Mishra

#adc #embedded #codec #audiodev #dsp #audio #conferenceaudio #audioprocessing #audioproduction #audioprogramming #musictech #soundtech #audiotech #audiotechnology