Keyboards, touch screens, gestures, and motion control are now common on consumer electronics. But all of these technologies come at a price, and not just in terms of cost. These man-machine input methods can affect design complexity, component count, and product size. For battery-powered products, power consumption is still a very important factor. Battery life has a huge impact on the appeal of the product.

Interest in the use of voice commands is rapidly increasing in remote control unit (RCU) applications. It's not hard to imagine that the microphones used in high-volume consumer devices (whether in electret type or MEMS version) are simple, low-cost, with billions of pieces produced each year. The 100 Hz - 10 kHz operating frequency range is far enough for voice commands, so no more advanced microphones are needed. This low cost is also very suitable for the price-sensitive RCU market.

Two other factors also make voice commands effective and attractive. The first is that speech recognition software has made tremendous progress in recent years, in part because of the increased processing power of semiconductor products. Even so, voice command applications are not as demanding, because the complexity is very low because only relatively few words need to be identified.

The second factor is that many wearable devices are very small, so not all have enough space to accommodate conventional switches, touch screens, or other input methods.

Following the launch of Dialog's tiny ultra-low-power Bluetooth Smart solution, SmartBondTM DA14580, last year, we hope to expand the lineup of this product line, making it easier for customers to implement voice commands on the remote unit. SmartBond devices combine Bluetooth low energy radio with ARM® Cortex®-M0 application processor and intelligent power management. Product design engineers can access ARM® processors with 32 GPIOs to create fully managed applications.

Dialog has proven expertise in consumer electronics voice technology – our voice codecs have shipped hundreds of millions of copies over the past few years and are used in almost every product, from cordless phones to gaming devices.

Introducing the SmartBond DA14582, optimized for voice technology and integrated with an analog audio codec and native support for the microphone, is a natural evolution for us. It uses analog MEMS or electret microphones to provide true plug-and-play support, and a reference design that guides how to connect. The microphone gain adjustment range is from 0 dB to + 30 dB (2 dB increase).

Our intention is that, in typical usage mode, the DA14582-based voice control device, whether for set-top boxes, smart TVs, games, or smart home applications, can operate for two years or more on a two-cell NiMh battery. Perhaps most importantly, because all electronic functions are provided through a SmartBondSoC, they are very easy to develop and manufacture.

The SmartBondSoC is available in a QFN package with a 0.5mm pitch. This helps manufacturers use very low cost PCB materials (phenolic PCB or single layer FR1 PCB) to reduce overall system cost. This is critical in applications such as remote controls because the PCB in this case is much larger than the PCBs of many other consumer electronics products.

According to IHS, the annual production of smart Bluetooth remote control devices will reach 56 million by 2018. We have reason to believe that these larger and larger devices will implement voice control because of its lower cost, better performance, and significantly longer battery life.

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