Historically, ESS Technology was most famous for their line of their Audiodrive chips for audio cards. Now they are known for their line of Sabre DAC and ADC products.
History
ESS Technologies was founded in 1983 as Electronic Speech Systems, by Professor Forrest Mozer, a space physicist at the University of California, Berkeley and Todd Mozer, Forrest Mozer's son, and Joe Costello, the former manager of National Semiconductors Digitalker line of talking chips. Costello left soon after the formation and started Cadence Designs with his former boss from National. Fred ChanVLSI designer and software engineer,[citation needed] in Berkeley, California, joined in 1985, and took over running the company in 1986 when Todd Mozer left for graduate school.
The company was created at least partially as a way to market Mozer's speech synthesis system (described in US patents 4,214,125, 4,433,434 and 4,435,831) after his (3-year, summer 1978 to summer 1981, extended) contract with National Semiconductor expired in 1983 or so.
Electronic Speech Systems produced synthetic speech for, among other things, home computer systems like the Commodore 64. Within the hardware limitations of that time, ESS used Mozer's technology, in software, to produce realistic-sounding voices that often became the boilerplate for the respective games. Two popular sound bites from the Commodore 64 were "He slimed me!!" from Ghostbusters and Elvin Atombender's "Another visitor. Stay a while—stay forever!" in the original Impossible Mission.
At some point, the company moved from Berkeley to Fremont, California. Around that time, the company was renamed to ESS Technology.
In the mid-1990s, ESS started working on making PC audio, and later, video chips, and created the Audiodrive line, used in hundreds of different products. Audiodrive chips were at least nominally CreativeSound Blaster Pro compatible. Many Audiodrive chips also featured in-house developed, OPL3-compatible FM synthesizers (branded ESFM Synthesizers). These synthesizers were often reasonably faithful to the Yamaha OPL3 chip, which was an important feature for the time as some competing solutions, including Creative's own CQM synthesis featured in later ISA Sound Blaster compatibles, offered sub-par FM sound quality. Some PCI-interface Audiodrives (namely the ES1938 Solo-1) also provided legacy DOS compatibility through Distributed DMA and the SB-Link interface.[citation needed]
In 2001 ESS acquired a small Kelowna design company (SAS) run by Martin Mallinson and continues R&D operations in Kelowna. The Kelowna R&D Center developed the Sabre range of DAC and ADC products that are used in many audio systems and cell phones.
Founders
Forrest Mozer continues his research work at the University of California, these days as Associate Director of Space Sciences. He was awarded EGU Hannes Alfven Medallist 2004 for his work in electrical field measurement and space plasma and also was involved in building the microphone to record sounds from the Mars Lander. He is a member of the board of directors of Sensory, Inc.
Fred Chan held a number of positions at ESS, and was CEO of Vialta, an internet offshoot of ESS, until his stepping down on July 18, 2007, to pursue philanthropic interests.[citation needed]
Professor Mozer's Patented Technology
Professor Mozer first became interested in speech technology when a blind student in his class in 1970 asked whether he could help design a talking calculator.[3] Mozer spent 5 years working on it, and his speech technology first appeared in the Telesensory Systems "Speech+" talking calculator, in a chip called the "CRC Chip", more commonly known as s14001a, the first self-contained speech synthesizer chip. This chip was also used in a few arcade games, notably Atari's Wolf Pack, and Stern Electronics' Berzerk and Frenzy, and in several of Stern's pinball machines.
After a three-year exclusive deal with Telesensory Systems from 1975 to 1978, Forrest Mozer sold a 3-year license to National Semiconductor, and they created another chip using Mozer synthesis, the MM54101 "Digitalker". At first, even then, all words were encoded by hand by Mozer in his basement, but in the third or fourth year of the license, National came up with a software encoder for it. After the exclusive license expired (National seemed to have a "non-exclusive" license for a year or so), Mozer licensed the technology to ESS. After Mozer's son Todd split off and created Sensory Circuits Inc., the technology was licensed there.
According to the Sensory Inc. history pages and old datasheets, they offered three types of compression:
MX (this compression is nearly identical to that used on the Digitalker, with some minor coding changes and possibly some RLE. It's apparently used on some alarm systems and on the Vtech talking baseball/football cards)
CX
SX
and a few other PCM/LPC based systems.
Although Sensory bought up the Texas Instruments' speech products, their main focus has been on speech recognition, and not synthesis.
Professor Mozer's technique not only produced very realistic sounding speech, it also required very little on-chip (later, in software) RAM, a sparse and expensive commodity at that time. The advanced compression algorithm (patented, an early form of psychoacoustic compression using similar spectra of ADPCM-encoded waves) reduced the memory footprint of speech about a hundredfold, so one second of speech would require 90 to 625 bytes. With ESS-speech, samples that would normally require almost all of the 64 kilobyte memory of the Commodore 64 (if encoded in PCM) were so small, that the entire game fit into the RAM along with speech, without requiring additional loads from disk.
ES9218P SABRE high fidelity system-on-chip; 32-bit stereo mobile digital-to-analog converter with 2 Volt headphone amplifier.[5]
Present day
Most recently, ESS SABRE DACs are used in the LG V10 smartphone, with a quad DAC configuration present in the V10's successor LG V20. A slightly upgraded version of the same DAC in the V20, the SABRE ES9218P,[5] is used in the V30 as well as the V40 ThinQ. The ESS9038Pro is their flagship and competes against Japanese AKM (Asahi Kasei Microdevices) AK4499EXEQ and American Cirrus Logic CS43131 for a share of the market. ESS and AKM dominate the desktop audiophile devices including external DACs and integrated all in one DAC/Amp devices. Meanwhile Cirrus Logic dominates the portable device market,[6] Apple Inc is its number one customer accounting for approximately 83% of its chip sales.
The luxury Sennheiser HE 1 electrostatic headphone[7] utilizes 8 internal DACs of the SABRE ES9018.
The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International. It has been listed in the Guinness World Records as the highest-selling single computer model of all time, with independent estimates placing the number sold between 12.5 and 17 million units. Volume production started in early 1982, marketing in August for US$595. Preceded by the VIC-20 and Commodore PET, the C64 took its name from its 64 kilobytes(65,536 bytes) of RAM. With support for multicolor sprites and a custom chip for waveform generation, the C64 could create superior visuals and audio compared to systems without such custom hardware.
A sound card is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces used for professional audio applications.
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process is speech recognition.
Sound Blaster is a family of sound cards and audio peripherals designed by Creative Technology/Creative Labs of Singapore. The first Sound Blaster card was introduced in 1989.
The MOS Technology 6581/8580 SID is the built-in programmable sound generator chip of the Commodore CBM-II, Commodore 64, Commodore 128, and MAX Machine home computers.
The Mockingboard is a sound card built by Sweet Micro Systems for the Apple II microcomputers. It improves on the Apple II's limited sound capabilities, as did other Apple II sound cards.
The digital sound revolution refers to the widespread adoption of digital audio technology in the computer industry beginning in the 1980s.
Ensoniq Corp. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid-1980s and 1990s for its musical instruments, principally samplers and synthesizers.
Software Automatic Mouth, or S.A.M., is a speech synthesis program developed by Mark Barton and sold by Don't Ask Software. The program was released for the Atari 8-bit computers, Apple II, and Commodore 64. Released in 1982, it was one of the first commercial all-software voice-synthesis programs.
The Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips are a series of speech synthesizer digital signal processor integrated circuits created by Texas Instruments beginning in 1978. They continued to be developed and marketed for many years, though the speech department moved around several times within TI until finally dissolving in late 2001. The rights to the speech-specific subset of the MSP line, the last remaining line of TI speech products as of 2001, were sold to Sensory, Inc. in October 2001.
The Covox Speech Thing is an external digital-to-analog converter (DAC) that plugs into the parallel printer port of a PC. It converts 8-bit digital sound using a simple R-2R resistor ladder into an analog signal output.
There have been various families of Yamaha audio controllers labelled as YMF7xx.
The Yamaha YM2151, also known as OPM is an eight-channel, four-operator sound chip. It was Yamaha's first single-chip FM synthesis implementation, being created originally for some of the Yamaha DX series of keyboards. Yamaha also used it in some of their budget-priced electric pianos, such as the YPR-7, -8, and -9.
Votrax International, Inc., or just Votrax, was a speech synthesis company located in the Detroit, Michigan area from 1971 to 1996. It began as a division of Federal Screw Works from 1971 to 1973. In 1974, it was given the Votrax name and moved to Troy, Michigan and, in 1980, split off of its parent company entirely and became Votrax International, Inc., which produced speech products up until 1984.
C-Media Electronics, Inc. is a Taiwan computer hardware company that manufactures processors for PC audio and USB storage, and wireless audio devices. Many of their PCI audio solutions can be found in the Xonar sound cards developed by ASUS.
Forrest S. Mozer is an American experimental physicist, inventor, and entrepreneur known best for his pioneering work on electric field measurements in space plasma and for development of solid state electronic speech synthesizers and speech recognizers.
The Yamaha YMF278B, also known as the OPL4, is a sound chip that incorporates both FM synthesis and sample-based synthesis by Yamaha.
Sensory, Inc. is an American company which develops software AI technologies for speech, sound and vision. It is based in Santa Clara, California.
Chipspeech is a singing vocal synthesizer software application and plugin created by Plogue that recreates the vocals of several 1980s speech synthesis chips from early home computers and video games.
The OPL series are a family of sound chips developed by Yamaha. The OPL series are low-cost sound chips providing FM synthesis for use in computing, music and video game applications.
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