Art of voice processing – Q&A with Fortemedia chairman and CEO Paul Huang - IC's everywhere
Your guess is correct. Our manufacturing partner is UMC. So far, 0.18-micron technology is utilized for our chips, and we are currently preparing to move to a 0.13-micron process. Next year, we will deploy 0.13-micron technology in mass production.
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Vyacheslav Sobolev, DigiTimes.com, Taipei [Friday 23 December 2005]
Several years ago, US-headquartered Fortemedia was known as an IC supplier providing audio controllers for sound card vendors, including several Taiwan companies. While the company has more recently jumped into a new market niche of voice processing and successfully approached many new customers (including, for example, car vendors), it still keeps close contact with Taiwan. DigiTimes.com talked to Paul Huang, the chairman and CEO of Fortemedia, about the company’s positioning, its cooperation with Taiwan, and technology developments related to voice processing.
Q: Before the era of Intel High Definition Audio (Azalia) technology, Fortemedia was known in the PC audio market as a chip supplier working with sound card vendors, such as Abit, A-Trend, Kye Systems and Terratec. Are you still involved in this business?
A: No, Fortemedia now concentrates its main effort on voice processing solutions, and since 2000 we have not been involved in the business you mention. It was far before the Azalia era when our main focus was shifted to developing voice-processing solutions handling various kinds of noise. Using our small array microphone (SAM) technology, we mainly work on noise suppression and echo cancellation mechanisms.
Q: How successful is your business in terms of revenues? How big was Fortemedia’s revenue in 2004? What are your revenue targets for this year and 2006?
A: Last year, our revenue was about US$6 million, and we are now expecting to exceed US$11 million in 2005. The target for next year is not yet defined.
Q: What do you currently see as the main driving forces for your market niche?
A: I can say that growing demand for mobility solutions is a key factor of our success. Wherever they are, on the road or in any kind of public place, people want to stay connected with their families, friends and working environment by using cell phones and other portable devices, such as PDAs, smartphones and communicators. They are often surrounded by various noise, so they actually need technology to help eliminate this background noise from their communication.
Q: Do you consider Skype and Skype-related applications as another driving force for your business?
A: Skype is a different story. This is a VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) solution, and its typical usage model implies that users communicate via headsets or USB phones connected to their notebooks or desktop PCs. People mainly use Skype at their homes or offices, and the environment is normally less noisy compared to truly mobile communications, such as when someone talks using a mobile phone or any other portable device on a street or in any public place. Skype itself does not have built-in functions to suppress noise, so this may create another opportunity for Fortemedia. We have customers utilizing our solutions in their notebooks. We also work with companies making USB speakerphones, which are helpful for Skype and other VoIP applications. However, saying that Skype or any other PC software drives our business would be too strong.
Q: How about Bluetooth? This market now seems to be growing rapidly. Do you agree? How big are currently your sales to customers developing Bluetooth-enabled devices?
A: Well, it would be not that easy to separate sales to those customers employing our solutions for their Bluetooth-enabled equipment. However, we definitely see the trend: there is currently a big growth in the Bluetooth market, and voice-processing solutions are in high demand in this market.
Q: In December 2002, Fortemedia announced that four Taiwan companies (Tel-Sunic, Jow Tong Technology, Triamp and Racewood Technology) selected the FM1061 voice processor for their Bluetooth-based hands-free car-kit applications. Do you still work with all these companies? Can you disclose any other names linking Fortemedia with the Bluetooth community?
A: I can confirm that, at least, three of those four companies still cooperate with us, and we have many customers in the Bluetooth community. For example, one of our top Taiwan customers is E-Lead Electronics, which is a well-known car-electronics supplier partnering with many famous car brands, and we all now see that Bluetooth support becomes more important for both major kinds of automotive electronics, built-in devices and aftermarket solutions. E-Lead is involved in some of our current R&D projects in the Asia Pacific region, and results of this work can be seen, for example, on the TOBE telematics system offered by Nissan for the Greater China market.
Q: How about your R&D projects for the automotive industry out of Taiwan?
A: I would like to mention one project in Europe, which was conducted together with Motorola and Jaguar. As a result, Jaguar has already started shipping vehicles equipped with our solution, and we expect to see it installed in 30-40% of Jaguar cars to be shipped in 2006. There is also another important project in the US targeted to develop a voice communication system for convertibles, with a noise suppression system component targeted to fully eliminate wind noise at speeds of to about 100kmph.
Q: Can you mention Fortemedia's top customers in Taiwan? How many Taiwan companies are now included in the top ten of your clients? How big are your product shipments to Taiwan companies?
A: The Greater China region is currently contributing more than 50% of our sales. Fortemedia's top clients include Taiwan companies, such as Mitac, Asustek, Wistron, E-Lead and Hamgshing, but I would not like to rank them or differentiate from one another by number of orders or anything else.
Q: Apart from Bluetooth, do you also consider Wireless USB (promoted by Intel) as another chance for your company?
A: Wireless USB is promoted as a supplement to wired USB technology, and looking forward, I would say that most traditional USB peripherals will most likely adopt this, sooner or later. Of course, this means another chance for broadening cooperation with our customers. For example, you probably know InfoAction, a part of US-based Actiontec, marketing USB speakerphones and other Skype-supporting hardware products under the VoSKY brand name. Actiontec is our customer, and once they have started using Wireless USB as an interface of their VoIP speakerphones, we must be ready to support them with our solutions.
Q: How do you support USB and other interfaces, through your own developments? Or do you license interface controllers from other companies?
A: We do not have a universal model for supporting interfaces. This means that we consider multiple options. As a result, we sometimes use open-source technologies, and USB is one of these cases. However, this is not the only way to support interfaces, and we also sometimes cooperate with other companies.
Q: Do you plan to license any of your technologies to third parties?
A: Yes, we have this sort of plan. As I said, the rising demand for noise suppression solutions now drives the market, and this means that more companies may potentially have an interest in their own developments related to noise suppression or incorporating it as a component. In the future, we will potentially be able to give them a flexible choice by offering both ready-to-use IC products and our IP (intellectual property) for licensing. So far, we have 12 patents pending, and all of them are related to our SAM technology.
Q: Do you work directly with car suppliers? If yes, can you tell a little about this work? For example, do you ship them standard IC products or customized ones?
A: We work directly with car suppliers, such as Hyundai, Jaguar, Kia and Nissan. Hyundai was our first customer of this sort. Next year we will hopefully add two more European names, which are famous in the car industry as luxury car suppliers, to our customer portfolio. We usually ship standard solutions to our customers, including car suppliers, but we also provide board-level reference designs for them to understand how to best utilize Fortemedia ICs.
Q: Does your company have its own driver development?
A: Yes, we do this development, but mainly focused on real-time operating systems, such as VSPWorks, which utilizes its VSP (virtual single processor) programming model that provides a single API (application programming interface) for all supported processors.
Q: Developed by Fortemedia and supported by its latest product, the FM1182 voice processor, SAM technology now features just 5mm between two microphones. How it is possible to make the distance that small and keep the high quality of noise suppression?
A: Including two or more microphones, an array microphone has a beam-forming capability that enhances in-beam signals and suppresses noises out of the beam. Beam forming does not exploit the signal sent to a loudspeaker as reference information to cancel acoustic echoes. Instead, it uses spatial filtering to remove echoes, including nonlinear echoes, which are usually difficult to remove. A key feature of our SAM technology is its three-dimensional cone-shaped beam-forming effect that helps to eliminate noise from above and below the beam, one of the major problems of conventional broadside array microphones having longer distance between microphones and forming a pie-shape beam.
Q: Is that 5mm distance something like a physical limit? Or do you plan to shrink the distance further in your next developments?
A: I would like to say that 5mm distance is now our target for solutions utilizing two omni-directional microphones, and this type of solution will feature the 5mm distance by the second quarter of 2006. Using a pair of microphones, one of which is omni-directional and another one is uni-directional, the distance can already be 2mm or even less. Omni-directional are cheaper compared to uni-directional ones, so we put a significant effort into letting customers use more cost-effective solutions, with no need to sacrifice the distance between microphones or the quality of noise suppression.
The other important thing is that our developments are driven by the sampling rate rather than the distance between microphones. Of course, there is a trend to increase the role of portables in our life and to make them more compact. Compared to old-fashioned telephones and early cell phones, current mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs are not just more stylish, but much smaller. As far as sizes go, the distance between microphones also matters. However, advanced voice processing algorithms may not help when the sampling rate remains low. With a pair of omni-directional microphones, our FM1093 voice processor supports 16kHz sampling rates, and this will also be a feature of our next-generation low-power chip aimed to launch in the third quarter of 2006. Designed to run all the algorithms of the FM1093, this chip will have power consumption about nine times lower than the FM1093 (180mW), and we also continue our work on delivering higher sampling rates.
Q: Have you already commenced on developments with using more than two microphones?
A: Not yet. As we see, there are currently three major challenges for companies, such as Fortemedia, designing voice processors. The first one is what we just discussed, the noise suppression and echo cancellation. Coming 3G systems make this challenge highly prioritized. Once adopted, they will let users see each other when they communicate via fixed or mobile phone. This is well known, but we should also realize that positioning a user in front of a camera means increasing the distance between mouth and microphone. Therefore, noises and echoes will become a more serious problem.
The two other challenges are handling accents and helping device makers reduce the size of their products. Taken together, these challenges lead us to develop what we call a Voice Keypad, a speaker-independent voice control system. We do not plan to compete with IBM and other giants working on server-level voice recognition solutions, but we have found that many of our customers, including some Taiwan companies developing GPS and Bluetooth products, need a simple system handling just a few commands, such as volume up, volume down or answer a call, without a need to be repeatedly taught or updated. Wearable devices may represent another area for deploying solutions such as our Voice Keypad, and there is also thought that iPod-like devices may also adopt it.
Q: Have you approached Apple?
A: No, but we have talked to companies making accessories for the iPod. They seem interested in this technology, and I am sure that one day in the future, we will be ready to talk about the iPod.
Q: Does Fortemedia consider any possibility for its voice processors to be integrated with MEMS microphones?
A: Yes, and I think that integrating voice processors with MEMS microphones is just a question of time. Expecting MEMS to further increase popularity, we would like to make our IC solutions compatible with MEMS microphones. Supported by our manufacturing partner, we have already started the development of our next-generation processor that will enable this feature.
Q: After seeing the list of Fortemedia investors, I would expect that your manufacturing base is UMC. Is this true? What CMOS technology processes are utilized for current generations of Fortemedia voice processors? What is your plan for next generations?
A: Your guess is correct. Our manufacturing partner is UMC. So far, 0.18-micron technology is utilized for our chips, and we are currently preparing to move to a 0.13-micron process. Next year, we will deploy 0.13-micron technology in mass production.
Q: Fortemedia now has offices in the US, Taiwan, China, Korea, Japan and Germany. How do you split your operations and engineering staff between these locations? What kind of opportunities do you see for your company in China?
A: We have about 50 people in China, and most of them are engineers. We also have engineers in the US and Taiwan, employing about 30 people at each location, but our goal is to concentrate up to 75% of our engineering staff outside the US because labor costs in the US are too high. The offices in Japan, Korea and Germany are mostly in charge of sales. Taiwan is our manufacturing base, and we also put a significant part of our effort into customer support here. I am sure that China will increase its role in our business as their 3C market keeps on growing, and expanding R&D activities is also a part of our strategy there. |
