Epson Develops 32-BIT Microcontroller with Dedicated Hardware which Can Play Sound on Either a Speaker or Buzzer

Sound is becoming an increasingly popular feature in home electronics, remote controllers for home appliances, industrial devices, health and fitness equipment with guidance systems, or alarms in office buildings, shopping complexes, and factories. This MCU is ideal for all these applications.

An ARM® Cortex®-M0+ processor integrated with a dedicated HW Processor provides 2-channel sound on a single MCU chip. By making it possible to output voice guidance sound like error and warning messages on a buzzer instead of a speaker, the usability of the MCU is increased. Common buzzer sound output performance is often very poor because of low volume and limited bandwidth. Epson improved buzzer performance by using a combination of software and hardware support.

An dedicated “HW processor” support of the MCU enables two special features.

First, the HW processor plays sound without requiring CPU resources, so CPU resources can be allocated to other processes even during sound playback. The use of a high data compression algorithm(16 kbps @ 15.625 kHz) shrinks the size of sound data memory, making it possible to provide a large amount of sound data and sound data in multiple languages.

One big advantage of Epson`s Sound solutions for customers is its own Voice Creation PC Tool. This software tool will be provided free of charge to customers and is a simple development environment for easily creating sound data for 12 languages without studio recording. You can also use existing WAV data.

Second, the MCU has a self- memory check function that can detect failures in built-in RAM, built-in Flash, and external QSPI-Flash memories without using CPU resources.

Epson is committed to helping its customers improve the performance of their products with solutions that leverage Epson’s efficient, compact, and precision technologies.

Product features

1. A variety of ways to play back sound

• Electromagnetic Buzzer ^*1
• Piezoelectric buzzer
• Speaker

^*1 S1C31D51 evaluation board includes the electromagnetic and piezoelectric buzzer by TDK Corporation that allows quick audio testing along with the preset demonstration.

1. The HW Processor dedicated hardware block executes a variety of functions without using CPU resources.

– A variety of speech and audio playback functions

• 2-channel mixing sound (for playing background music + voice)
• Voice speed conversion (playback speed adjustable in 5% increments between 75% and 125%)
• The sampling rate of 15.625 kHz is high enough for background music as well as voice.
• High-compression voice decoding algorithm with high sound quality (16/24/32/40 kbps)

– Self-memory check function

• Built-in RAM (R/W check, MARCH-C START)
• Built-in Flash checksum, CRC
• External QSPI-Flash checksum, CRC

– Simple HW Processor interface

• Just set functions and commands in the special register and then start

1. Easily create voice data with Epson’s Voice Creation PC tool

– Studio recording is not needed. The PC tool is all that is needed to create speech data. Support is provided for the languages below.

• America: American English, American Spanish, Canadian French
• Europe: British English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian
• Asia: Japanese, Chinese, Korean

– Sound data, which is assigned a number in the PC tool, can be played back by specifying the assigned number in the HW processor register, so there is no need to create and evaluate codes for linking sound data, etc.

– WAV format sound data is easily imported into the PC tool

ARM and Cortex are registered trademarks of ARM Limited (or its subsidiaries) in the US and other countries. All rights reserved.

About Epson
Epson is a global technology leader dedicated to becoming indispensable to society by connecting people, things and information with its original efficient, compact and precision technologies. The company is focused on driving innovations and exceeding customer expectations in inkjet, visual communications, wearables and robotics. Epson is proud of its contributions to realizing a sustainable society and its ongoing efforts to realizing the United Nations‘ Sustainable Development Goals. Led by the Japan-based Seiko Epson Corporation, the worldwide Epson Group generates annual sales of more than JPY 1 trillion.
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