Beamforming
Cutting-Edge Beamforming IP Solutions
Beamforming is a signal processing technique used to enhance the directivity of microphone arrays. Unlike traditional omnidirectional microphones that capture sound uniformly from all directions, beamforming enables microphone arrays to selectively focus on specific sound sources or spatial regions.
In a microphone array system, multiple microphones are arranged in a carefully designed configuration. By manipulating the phase and amplitude of signals received by each microphone element, beamforming algorithms can create spatially selective pickup patterns, effectively steering the sensitivity of the array towards desired sound sources.
Beamforming enhances the clarity and intelligibility of speech by focusing on the desired sound source while attenuating background noise and reverberation while allowing microphone arrays to extend their effective pickup range without sacrificing sensitivity or increasing microphone size
How does Dolphin Semiconductor guarantee great beamforming ADC & PDM to PCMs?
Phase shift degrade beamforming performances:
Delays or phase shifts among microphone channels disrupt the delicate phase relationships necessary for effective beamforming. This misalignment undermines the system’s ability to accurately localize sound sources in space, ultimately compromising the overall performance of the beamforming solution.
At Dolphin, we understand the critical importance of maintaining phase coherence among microphone channels to ensure optimal beamforming accuracy. That’s why we’ve developed cutting-edge digital filtering capabilities integrated directly into our PDM to PCM interfaces and ADCs.
Asynchronous events degrade Beamforming performances:
The use of unaligned microphones stream limits the performance of beamforming accuracy.
Delays or phase shifts unbalance the phase relationship between channels. This will have an impact on the ability of a beamforming system to target a sound in space.
This alignement can be done with the DSP, but it will have an impact on power consumption and latency.
To unload the DSP, Dolphin has integrated this signal processing directly into the ADC or PDM to PCM interface.