Broadcom brings noise cancellation to bluetooth headsets

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 05 June 2007 12:26

Your IT - Home IT

The same noise cancelling technology used in headphones sold for use on airplanes is now available in bluetooth headsets, thanks to a collaboration between chipmaker, Broadcom and noise cancellation software developer SoftMax.

The two companies have announced that the SoftMax 1VOICE noise reduction technology has been incorporated into the Broadcom BCM2047 Bluetooth headset chip. According to Broadcom, "By adding SoftMax's signal separation technology to Broadcom's highly-integrated BCM2047 architecture, manufacturers can design sleek form factor [Bluetooth headsets] that perform well in almost any noise environment."

Broadcom claims that, compared to competing silicon products that use proprietary processor technologies and require custom software development, its new ARM-based BCM2047 "provides a familiar environment to speed software development. This rapid development provides Broadcom's customers with a variety of ways to differentiate their products without adding significant cost and development time to their design cycles."

According to Sheldon Gilbert, vice president of business development for SoftMax, "By leveraging Broadcom's ARM-based development approach, we quickly ported our software to its new Bluetooth headset solution, allowing OEMs to deliver products with superior performance right away. Also, the efficient ARM-based architecture was an excellent match for our technology, resulting in world class noise reduction performance in a very small MIPS and battery-power footprint."

SoftMax's 1VOICE noise reduction technology is based on a proprietary signal separation platform that "uses sophisticated adaptive statistical techniques to separate voice signals from any background noise...by extracting the individual components from the mixture of audio captured by the user's device making it very effective against all types of noise whether stationary, such as road noise, or non-stationary, such as music or other human voices."

The SoftMax 1VOICE solution on the BCM2047 is also claimed to provides a complete audio enhancement package including echo cancellation and automatic volume control.