AudioReach
Design for the Modern SoC
Modern SoCs offer audio developers an extraordinary array of specialized compute resources — Hexagon DSP, dedicated NPUs, and ultra-low-power aDSP — but unlocking these resources traditionally requires deep expertise in inter-process communication, shared memory management, interrupt handling, and multi-core scheduling that has nothing to do with audio development. This talk introduces AudioReach, Qualcomm's open-source SDK, and explains how its graph-based architecture abstracts this systems complexity so that audio developers can focus on what they do best. We will cover AudioReach's practical development workflow — from designing and simulating algorithms in MATLAB, through Hexagon DSP simulation and off-target graph construction in AudioReach Creator (ARC), to on-target deployment and performance profiling on real hardware — and show how this framework uses both traditional DSP modules and AI inference modules, enabling developers to build sophisticated heterogeneous audio pipelines without becoming embedded systems experts. We will also share the AudioReach roadmap with compelling new features for audio developers.
Patrick Lai
Principal Engineer
Qualcomm
Patrick Lai is a Principal Engineer at Qualcomm with more than 20 years of experience in audio software engineering. Throughout his career, he has led the design and development of audio software across a diverse range of Qualcomm products starting from very first Android mobile phone
Patrick spearheaded the effort to establish AudioReach as an open-source project based on the Qualcomm Audio SDK — delivering an end-to-end development toolchain purpose-built for embedded systems and heterogeneous SoC architectures with multiple cores and power domains.
At ADC 2026, Patrick will be delivering a technical talk on AudioReach's architecture and its studio-to-silicon development workflow, as well as hosting a workshop giving hand-on experience of audio development on Qualcomm platforms.