Implmentation of digital audio effect SoC

This paper describes the implementation of digital audio effect SoC (system on chip) which integrates the embedded DSP core, audio codec IP, a number of peripheral blocks and various audio effect algorithms. The audio effect SoC is developed by a software and hardware co-design method. The embedded DSP and some dedicated hardware blocks are developed as a hardware design while the audio effect algorithms are realized by a software centric way. In the implementation of audio effects, we employ the primitive functions of the embedded DSP compiler which provide the efficient way to implement the audio effect algorithms. Most of the algorithms are implemented by C language with the primitive functions and they are run on the embedded DSP while the equalizer which requires a large amount of computing power is implemented by the dedicated hardware block with high flexibility. The audio effect SoC was fabricated by using 0.18 um CMOS process and it was evaluated successfully on the real-time test board.