EDN magazine gave Akustica a “2006 Innovator of the Year” award in the Mixed Signal ASSP category for their AKU2000 digital microphone chip, which has seen early adoption in laptops, most notably in Fujitsu’s Lifebooks. Akustica’s digital microphones have tremendous advantages over traditional ECM microphones, most notably EMI immunity, surface mountability, smaller size and better and far more consistent acoustic performance from part to part, which enables multiple microphone applications for noise cancellation and directionality. Multiple mic applications in the PC world will become increasingly common given Microsoft’s new audio stack in Vista, which supports multi-mic array audio input, enabling directionality and noise-reduction for audio input, something increasingly important for laptops in the VOIP/Skype era. And Akustica is now benefiting from their early collaboration with Microsoft and anticipates additional PC vendors will announce laptop designs that include one or more Akustica chips in the coming months.
Ken, Jim and the rest of the Akustica team, congrats!