Marvell, a world leader in storage, cloud infrastructure, Internet of Things (IoT), connectivity and multimedia semiconductor solutions, today announced that its Avastar® combo wireless solutions will be powering a wide range of wirelessly connected audio products including soundbars, speakers, AVRs and wearable audio. The 88W8887 and 88W8997 are designed to enable device manufacturers to build highly synchronized wireless audio solutions across multiple rooms and zones, delivering best-in-class connected audio experience over 802.11ac. The recently announced 88W8977 wireless solution is targeted for the wearables & hearables market, addressing the need for low power and cost effective 802.11n solutions, along with Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy. Marvell’s new standalone NFC chip, the NF100 is designed to be used to enable tap, pair and play use cases for wireless audio products.
The Avastar 88W8887 was selected to power Frontier Silicon’s Minuet connected audio modules featuring Google Cast technology for audio devices. The same wireless solution can also be found in Google’s recently launched Chromecast Audio device. The combined solution will deliver synchronization accuracy in micro seconds, to address the highly demanding multi-channel HD Audio streaming market. Marvell and Frontier Silicon will showcase time synchronized wireless audio streaming demo at Marvell’s booth at CES.
“We are very proud of this collaboration and believe that our work with Frontier Silicon’s Minuet module further reflects our leadership in wireless audio,” said Kevin Tang, Senior Director of Marketing, Wireless Connectivity Business Unit at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. “Our engineering team has worked closely with Frontier Silicon to deliver the best-in-class, synchronized wireless audio solutions. We see a great opportunity in the wireless audio and hearables market and strive to deliver the most reliable, low-power wireless connectivity solutions to our partners and customers.”
“Frontier Silicon is proud to partner with Marvell for our Minuet module wireless audio products. As we strive to develop 802.11ac solutions in the rapidly growing wireless audio space, we look to Marvell to provide reliable products that offer a seamless experience to the highly fragmented Wireless Audio market,” said Anthony Sethill, CEO of the Toumaz Group, parent company of Frontier Silicon. “We are confident that as more audio brands enter the market, we will be positioned for success through our unique offering and work with Marvell. We’re also excited to extend our partnership with Marvell in the future, by working on building very low power 802.11n solutions to address the newly emerging Hearables market.”
The recently launched Avastar 88W8977 SoC is a low-power wireless chipset designed to offer the lowest RBOM and smallest form factor for devices aimed at the dynamic wearables and hearables markets. It offers one of the lowest power 802.11n with BLE-only modes, designed to maintain very low power BLE-only link between wearable audio devices and the corresponding soundbars streaming music. A Wi-Fi connection is triggered when music streaming is active, with very low latency. Additionally, Marvell’s Wireless Audio portfolio includes the 2×2, 802.11ac combo (88W8997), as well as 1×1, 802.11ac combo (88W8887) to cover different product categories.
Marvell’s multi-channel wireless audio solutions are being showcased at CES 2016 in Marvell’s suite, Level 3, Murano No. 3304, at The Venetian. CES is being held in Las Vegas at the Las Vegas Convention and World Trade Center and the Venetian Hotel on Jan. 6–9, 2016.
Frontier Silicon’s Minuet module and speaker toolkit will be showcased at CES 2016, in their suite in The Venetian, Level 3, Toscana No. 3708. The demo will include Frontier’s multi-room platform across a number of interoperable audio devices from different manufacturers.
For more information, please visit www.Marvell.com.
