Texas Instruments designs $5 wireless headphones with 22-hour battery life
09.06.11
Similar to the way Zigbee has been billed as the low-power wireless networking protocol for home automation, TI designed PurePath to be strictly used for audio data. As such, it offers functionality not commonly found in audio devices with Bluetooth. For example, the new SoC debuted today (CC8530) is capable of streaming two uncompressed stereo streams (16-bit, 44.1-KHz or 48-KHz) from a single source simultaneously to four different receivers.
Though interference in the 2.4GHz band is often problematic, TI says PurePath offers "excellent coexistence" with Bluetooth and WLAN, and that it has a high mean time between dropout when compared to other wireless audio streaming solutions.
For equipment designers or independent developers, TI released a headset development kit and reference design today that utilize the PurePath standard and nearly 100% TI-made components.
"We've done all back-end work with the new wireless headset reference design, so engineers can build a prototype in less than one day," said Erling Simensen, product marketing manager, wireless audio at TI.
Source: BetaNews