Cirrus Logic Eyes Leveraging LEDs For Future AV, Tablet Products

The inflection point to reach the billion-unit sales target the LED industry has staked for 2014 is the $10-$15 light bulb, said David Biven, Cirrus Logic director-product marketing, energy products. While there are products on the market at that price point now, “they're not very good,” he said on a call with investors.

Consumers haven’t been happy with the dimming capability of compact fluorescent bulbs, Biven said, leaving a great opportunity for Cirrus to create driver ICs that are “compatible with every dimmer.” He said prices will continue to fall for bulbs, driven by dramatic price declines for LEDs that will continue over the next 18-24 months, “faster than a lot of people were projecting.” The company has LED products on the market in Europe and plans to be in the U.S. and other parts of the world later this year to take advantage of one of the “biggest land-grabs,” he said.

In an atmosphere of rapidly declining prices, Cirrus will have to “work hard” to keep margins in a range that’s beneficial for the company, said CEO Jason Rhode. “We've never participated in a market that grew as quickly as LED is expected to do.” Adopting a strategy from its audio business, the company has to “keep looking for opportunities to integrate or eliminate external components,” he said. There’s an opportunity with LED for the company to help commoditize other components in the system, drive down the bill of materials and create more efficiency in design as “the heat sink is a non-trivial part of the cost of these things,” he said.

In the audio market, where Apple accounted for 62 percent of Cirrus Logic revenues last year (CED June 1 p9), there are additional opportunities such as noise cancellation and signal processing to improve the multimedia experience, said Carl Alberty, director-product marketing, audio. There also are opportunities in “improving the voice experience” for smartphones and tablets, he said. Alberty cited noise suppression, along with echo-cancelation features for speakerphone mode and videoconferencing. Other areas of potential advancement include offloading signal processing from core applications processors to minimize power consumption and improve battery life, he said.

Outside of the handset market, Cirrus is looking for ways to leverage technology developed for mobile applications to devices like TVs, Alberty said. “The TV audio experience has gotten worse since TVs have gotten thinner and thinner.” That leaves opportunities to sell “every piece of our product portfolio” into devices that make the TV listening experience better, Alberty said. He referred to soundbars as a possible target, saying “TVs themselves are less interesting for the value we're providing.” Soundbars offer a chance to sell converters, amplifiers and DSPs into a single application, he said.

Regarding TV’s future role as the hub of entertainment, Alberty cited the continued evolution of how people interact with a variety of different devices and the signal-processing challenges associated with interacting with a TV that’s different from a remote control. Opportunities exist on the signal-processing and data-conversion sides, he said, and there’s interest from Cirrus Logic’s traditional CE home audio customers to “figure out some of those challenges.” On wireless speakers, Alberty said Cirrus participates in that market segment with data conversion and amplification, not in the wireless aspect, per se. “More and more customers” are building those products, ranging from low-wattage Bluetooth speakers to higher performance products like Sonos wireless audio systems, he said.

Opportunities extend beyond the TV, according to Rhode’s crystal ball. “Ten years from now I hope we're all walking the house talking to the toaster and not having a bunch of remote controls that don’t work with anything,” he said. A key to enabling that is signal-processing capabilities the company is working on now and for the future, he said.

On the cellphone end, aside from Apple, which has paid attention to signal-to-noise ratio and distortion performance as a differentiator for audio quality, other phone makers “have paid a lot less attention overall to actual audio design,” Rhode said. There’s a “tremendous opportunity” to add value for improving the voice experience in all handsets, not just smartphones, he said. “Everybody would like their speakerphones to work a little better, be louder or have less echo."

Regarding consumer and automotive opportunities, Alberty said Cirrus tries to go after the leading customers in each segment, as it did with smartphones. The company has designed custom chipsets for customers where the outlook is “really positive,” he said. Cirrus is seeing “some bounce-back” on the automotive side of the business, but in the consumer space there’s a “lack of a compelling application, which is why there’s so much momentum behind the portable audio space,” he said. Cirrus has a strong base in CE, he said, and tries to leverage other investments in signal processing and low-power applications into CE, but the company focus is on the mobile space.

Cirrus has to “pick customers carefully” on tablets and other custom customers, Rhode said, since it costs $3 million-$5 million to develop a new codec, and even more for an advanced geometry such as 55-nanometer technology. “If you develop a custom codec for somebody and they only sell a few million of them or less,” he said, in reference to every tablet but the iPad, “you've just wasted a ton of resources, time and money.” Cirrus wants to keep its “fingers in all the different accounts,” he said. “Just because somebody’s not tearing it up today doesn’t mean they're not going to be coming up with some great idea the next time around.” Generic programmable ICs can act a “fishing lure,” allowing Cirrus to address a lot of applications around which customers can program their own algorithms, he said. “If it looks like it’s going to become something more promising, we can talk about wrapping a custom chip around it.”