Trigence Semiconductor, the inventor of Dnote full digital audio signal processing technology, announced it has received investment from Intel Capital, Intel's global investment organization. With the investment from Intel Capital, Trigence Semiconductor will expand integration of Dnote to computing devices, including Intel-based PCs, ultrabook, and smartphones, and also expects to expand its LSI and licensing businesses.

Trigence Semiconductor develops advanced digital audio technology that delivers high audio quality to different platforms, and licenses these technologies. Dnote, the proprietary digital signal processing technology, enables large reductions in power consumption while significantly improving audio quality by driving speakers directly through digital signals [without converting audio from digital to analogue form first], and which Trigence expects to replace current analog audio systems. Trigence’s technology has already been licensed to Japanese car-audio manufacturers, and has also earned a good reputation for sound quality.

“Audio technology is evolving substantially, as a new user interface for computers. We think it will become a key aspect of communication between computers and people, as an interactive user interface using speech recognition, rather than just for listening to music. With the new investment, we aim to step up our licensing of technology for computing devices, and to substantially reinforce our business infrastructure by starting volume production of chips,” said Akira Yasuda, Founder, President & CEO, Trigence Semiconductor.

Intel expects Trigence’s all-digitial audio technology to bring an innovative high fidelity experience to the wide variety of digital devices such as PCs, ultrabook and smartphones. Essentially, it means that Intel-based devices will get higher quality audio sub-systems with lowered power consumption. At the same time, since Dnote-enabled audio systems will have to use multi-coil speakers, initially they may cost slightly more than conventional systems.

Tags: Intel, Trigence