Alif combines AI with latest LC3 Bluetooth audio codec
Alif Semiconductor is showing its latest AI-enabled Bluetooth wireless microcontroller with an audio codec that it says marks the end of Bluetooth Classic.
The company is also looking at a move to the 10nm FD-SOI process technology being developed in Europe.
The Balletto chip combines a Bluetooth Low Energy front end with RISC-V core with a more powerful ARM Cortex-M55 microcontroller and Ethos-U55 neural processing unit. The chip is notable for running the Bluetooth Auracast protocol in BLE5.3 with the latest LC3 codec.
The LC3 (low complexity communication codec) supports a bandwidth range from 16kbps to 320kbps per channel, with the ability to handle sampling rates from 8kHz to 48kHz. It was developed by Fraunhofer IIS and Ericsson developed LC3 as the successor to the SBC codec.
The key is that is supports multiple streams of audio, something that has not been possible previously with BLE, and this will drive BLE into smartphones.
“LC3 means BT Classic will be phased out as with BLE devices can be smaller and cheaper and Auracast can be a broadcast system so you can have the host do the LC3 encoding and broadcast so a receiver can tune into any one of the streams,” Henrik Flodell, senior marketing manager at Alif Semiconductor tells eeNews Europe ahead of the Embedded World exhibition in Nuremberg which starts today.
“With the M55 we have hardware acceleration so we can process up to 7 consecutive streams, for lots of screens, you can tune to the screen that you want to listen to via headphones even if there are other streams. These are also the first microcontroller with an integrated NPU to accelerate machine learning,” he added.
The Balletto chip has been developed from the digital specification of the Ensemble E1 microcontroller launched last year, adding the RF front end on the same die. This implies the same front end can be added to other Ensemble devices such as the E3 and E5.
“We are working with lead customers and we are deciding where to take this now, whether that is triple or quad core devices,” he said, pointing to the Ensemble parts that have two M55 cores and two A32 application processors. “We strongly believe it makes more sense to have the BLE host to be capable of doing the full application.”
Like the E1, the Balletto has 2MB of tightly coupled memory and 2MB of MRAM non-volatile memory rather than flash, which allows the chips to be built on the 22FDX FD-SOI process at GlobalFoundries. “10nm FDSOI is in the strategic roadmap as some things will require us to go to smaller geometries.”
As well as BLE, the Balletto chip runs the 802.15.4 Zigbee protocol and Matter.
“We use a split architecture with a separate execution for the baseband with its own CPU RISC-V core that is not user programme and that offloads the signal processing so matter runs on the application core,” said Flodell.
The higher performance of the M55 core and U55 NPU and the large memory could boost the adoption of Matter, he says.
“It seems like Matter lost some momentum and that may have to do with the fact that is has quite a lot of code and its become an integration problem as the stack is not something to take lightly,” he said.
“We do have plans to increase our performance and our ability to run much larger AI models in smaller devices in space constrained designs.”
Balletto is sampling now with the plan for mass production around May.
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