Grenoble, France - August 25, 2017 - The ongoing analog switch-off in several emerging economies, refresh cycles in North America and some parts of Europe, and upgrades to advanced functionality with a richer user interface for quick search and discovery of content are driving the growth of the global Set-top Boxes market.

In this competitive market, Fabless providers must offer SoC which combine high performances with cost-effectiveness. To meet these challenges, Zhaoxin has licensed from Dolphin Integration a high quality audio DAC with the smallest silicon footprint for its new generation of STB SoC at 28 nm.

The pure logic audio DAC from Dolphin Integration, sDACa-MT1.03, is the world densest audio converter at 28 nm as its area scales with process geometry. Fitting in an area smaller than 0.1 mm2 at 28 nm, this stereo audio converter features a SNR higher than 95 dB using a low BoM cost application schematic, which is ideal for a Set-top Box SoC.

A first usage at 28 nm has demonstrated to Zhaoxin that the ultra-dense sDACa-MT1.03 may be safely embedded in their 28 nm SoC to meet the audio standard and to provide high-quality audio to its Set-top Box users.

"Our experience of using Dolphin Integration’s ultra-dense audio DAC has been very positive. » said Michael Shiuan, Senior Vice President at Zhaoxin. « A pure logic DAC is extremely compact at 28 nm and enables to drastically reduce the industrial test duration, as structural testing such as SCAN can efficiently be applied, which is pivotal for our SoC competitiveness on the aggressive market of Set-Top Boxes."

This stereo DAC has been designed to support various applications such as Set-Top-Box, wireless speakers, digital radio or Smart TV and enables to reach performances up to 105 dB of SNR depending on the application schematics.

"This generation of PWM audio DAC offers a wide flexibility to our users, guided by our application engineers for selecting the cost-effective application schematics meeting the targeted performances." said Frederic Renoux, Executive VP Marketing and Sales at Dolphin Integration. "Its pure-logic design offers the easiest integration within the SoC. Combined with our pure-logic sDSA-VD-LP.02 for data acquisition from digital microphone, cost effective CODEC solutions is now a must at advanced nodes."