Summit Wireless Under Development in 21 Projects, Parent Says at CES

LAS VEGAS -- Summit Semiconductor is targeting the top 40 percent of the home theater market this year with its Summit Wireless SoC technology, positioned as an audio/video receiver replacement. Summit Wireless, which debuted in the fall at CEDIA in speakers from Aperion Audio, is under development in 21 projects, according to the company, and will appear at the $1,000 hi-fi level before going mainstream in 2012 in flat-panel TVs and $500-level home-theater-in-a-box systems.

Aperion speakers will begin shipping at month’s end in a pilot run to fulfill pre-orders and review sample quantities, Tony Parker, vice president of marketing, told us, with full production slated for the end of Q1. The Aperion system is priced at $2,500 for a 5.1-channel system, including the HDMI switching box, and $3,000 for a 7.1-channel system, he said. He wouldn’t disclose upcoming partner companies.

The Summit system performs automatic speaker setup, eliminating the need for consumers to perform test-tone procedures or use setup microphones to set the proper delay for a surround-sound setup, Parker said. Speaker ODMs combine the chip-based modules with amplifiers and power supplies. The technology will be built into flat-panel TVs, in set-top boxes, game machines, Blu-ray players, audio/video receivers and “anywhere where audio decoding is happening,” he said.

The company is moving into the home-theater-in-a-box business but not lower-end systems that use a wireless sub or wireless backchannel, Parker said, because compression technology in those systems “tend to be very low quality,” he said. He said the company is “focused on home theater audiophile quality and bringing that to the masses as production quantities increase.” At CES, several ODMs, including Meiloon, TCL, and SB Acoustics, showcased Summit technology. “We have the ecosystem pretty well greased with our technology, so that as brands come to [ODMs], we're ready to support them,” he said. Hansong will provide integrated power supply amplifier reference designs, he said.

Parker said consumers’ appetite for conventional audio/video receivers is changing. “The 35-and-under crowd really doesn’t understand what an AVR is,” he said, saying consumers older than that may know but are looking “for a clean look” and electronics that don’t “take up a lot of closet space.” The Summit solution reduces the equipment stack to a simple box, the Summit module containing “everything you would see on an AVR absent the power supply and the huge amplifiers that add bulk,” he said.

Summit works with companies like Hansong to integrate modules pre-certified by the FCC into a “backplate” that integrates the Summit transceiver with the power supplies and amplifiers chosen by the brand. Backplates are shipped to the speaker ODM, which sells it to the brand for final testing and shipping. The modular, pre-certified approach can shave years off speaker design time, Parker said, noting that Aperion went from “ground zero to full product in six months, something that’s unheard of in this industry for something of this quality.” Most speaker ODMs don’t have electronics and wireless expertise, he said, so Summit offers something they can’t easily obtain otherwise. “Getting a pre-certified module that’s been UL-tested and FCC-certified can be done very well and quickly allowing for easy retrofit or a new cabinet design,” he said.

Down the road, Summit plans to incorporate its technology into flat-panel TVs, which pack their own switching capability. Built-in Summit wireless technology can solve the problem of poor-quality audio from flat-panel TVs, he said. The first step, he said, is Summit Connect, which “takes a software upgrade to a Linux-based TV,” routes the audio to a USB port to a dongle with Summit technology that can be bought as an aftermarket accessory or bundled with speakers. The wireless system is scalable from a single speaker design up to 7.1 channels, Parker said. “It will give you much better sound than what you'd get from a TV,” he said.

Summit is also looking at a sound bar option for TVs. The strategy starts with a 3.1-channel version with a wireless sub, but “we can extend this to a 5.1- or 7.1-channel solution by adding surround speakers because the system automatically recognizes that the speakers are in play and will map it and send the correct sound to them,” he said. The company road map touts further cost reductions that will allow the technology to be put into smaller form factors such as cube-type speakers reminiscent of Bose designs, he said.

Summit chips have built-in digital signal processing with three filter paths that replace analog crossovers, Parker said. That allows a speaker designer to tune the speaker to the exact amplifier and driver characteristics chosen. “We can take poor quality components and flatten out the response curves over the whole frequency range,” he said, since a designer can “load up a set of coefficients inside the chip” that compensate for the poor performance of a driver. Tuning a speaker can take three to four months using analog crossovers, because it’s a complex process, he said. In the digital domain, tuning time can be cut to two days, he said. In addition, building filters into the chips eliminates the need for speaker ODMs to buy and manage analog crossovers and thus reduces inventory costs, he said.

Summit Wireless also offers automatic surround-sound setup that can be tailored to any seating location in a room with the press of a button, Parker said. The system automatically assigns the correct audio channel to each speaker, he said. Systems are expandable if users want to add channels “or if you want to store your surround speakers in a closet and bring them out on movie night,” he said. “Our system would automatically recognize the speakers and set them up.”