A low-cost and low-power digital audio processor

Digital audio signal processing has become increasingly popular in multimedia systems, largely thanks to the advent of general digital signal processor (DSP) chips and high-precision oversampling A/D and D/A converters. For portable and home entertainment audio systems, however the general-DSP-chip-based solution might be too costly and consume too much power. Then a low-cost and low power solution for this purpose should be sought. By carefully examining digital audio processing applications, the authors believe that there exist two possible approaches that can reduce the chip area and power consumption: one is the simplification of the audio processor structure, and the other is to reduce the chip supply voltage. This paper presents a low-power and low-cost two-channel (stereo) digital audio processor that exploits these two approaches.