Malaspina Labs VoiceBoost Integrates into NXP's CoolFlux DSP Core

NXP and Malaspina Labs will be demonstrating the VoiceBoost ASR Assist solution at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 24–27, 2014 (NXP stand in Hall 7, E30)

Eindhoven, Netherlands and Barcelona, Spain, February 24, 2014 - NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ: NXPI) and Malaspina Labs are pleased to announce the availability of Malaspina’s VoiceBoost™ suite of phonetic speech enhancement technologies for NXP licensable Ultra Low Power (ULP) CoolFlux™ DSP (digital signal processing) cores. The VoiceBoost suite of solutions includes ASR Assist audio preprocessing, speaker-dependent and speaker-independent low-power voice activation, and noise reduction solutions. VoiceBoost solutions provide improved voice communication and voice interaction on ultra-low power devices in high-noise environments.

“Thanks to its built-in speech models, Malaspina Labs is strong in its focus on ultra-low power devices and difficult use cases such as arm’s length speaking distances, single-microphone devices, and devices held in arbitrary orientations,” said Johan Van Ginderdeuren, director of CoolFlux licensing, NXP Semiconductors. “Interacting with your phone using voice commands is now a common use case, but the technology to allow that to work effectively in noisy environments and arbitrary orientations is still difficult. Malaspina’s VoiceBoost solutions are designed to work in high noise and arm’s length orientations where traditional solutions don’t.”

VoiceBoost unique speech enhancement solutions enhance voice communication and interaction in a wide range of environments, including vehicle interior and street traffic noise, background conversations and background music noise. VoiceBoost solutions are scalable in MIPS, memory and latency to meet the requirements of a broad range of applications including bone conduction, telecomm and human machine interfaces. “NXP’s CoolFlux architecture offers great performance at low power in both single-core and multi-core designs, which our VoiceBoost suite can take full advantage of,” said Dean Neumann, CEO of Malaspina Labs. “We are delighted to be able to offer optimized solutions that execute robustly at extremely low power levels on CoolFlux-based DSPs.”

VoiceBoost ASR Assist solutions can be configured to execute on DSPs based on NXP Semiconductor’s CoolFlux architecture in as little as 20 Mcycles and under 19 Kwords of memory.

About CoolFlux DSP

NXP’s embedded CoolFlux™ DSP core for ultra-low power audio applications was developed for high performance power-sensitive portable audio applications. The CoolFlux DSP, initially created and still successful for Hearing Aid applications is also used in chips for smartphones, tablets, portable media players and headsets. Other CoolFlux core family members like CoolFlux BSP support ULP software defined radio and wireline baseband processing and smart sensor processing. NXP licenses CoolFlux DSP cores through its corporate IP & Licensing division. CoolFlux comes with a highly effective Software Programming Suite. NXP also offers a comprehensive application software library for audio processing further enhanced with premium firmware by ISVs such as Malaspina Labs and NXP Software. Find out more at www.coolflux.com.

About Malaspina Labs

Malaspina Labs advances the state of the art in real-time speech enhancement for ultra-low power devices. Malaspina Labs focuses on the development of rotation & orientation robust speech processing algorithms which operate deterministically at bone-conduction, telecom, and voice interface latencies within the resource constraints of milliwatt-class processors designed for mobile, embedded, medical and consumer devices. Malaspina’s VoiceBoost suite of solutions have been shown to increase speech intelligibility by hearing impaired users in noisy environments, as well as to increase automatic speech recognition performance and mobile voice call quality in high noise environments.
For more information visit www.malaspina-labs.com.

About NXP Semiconductors

NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ: NXPI) creates solutions that enable secure connections for a smarter world. Building on its expertise in High Performance Mixed Signal electronics, NXP is driving innovation in the automotive, identification and mobile industries, and in application areas including wireless infrastructure, lighting, healthcare, industrial, consumer tech and computing. NXP has operations in more than 25 countries, and posted revenue of $4.82 billion in 2013. Find out more at www.nxp.com.