Design of a scalable and programmable sound synthesizer

Abstract

Sound synthesis employed in many multimedia systems is a useful method to generate the sound of musical instruments. Although it has a long history of development, a few researches have been devoted to deriving efficient VLSI architectures. In this paper, we analyze the inherent dataflow of sound synthesis methods and propose a programmable VLSI architecture suitable for a scalable sound synthesizer. The sound quality and the level of polyphony can be enhanced only by increasing the operating speed and enlarging the memory. A fully integrated sound synthesis system is implemented as a prototype to verify the proposed architecture. The prototype chip fabricated in a 0.18-mu m CMOS process occupies 1.5 mm x 1.5 mm, and can synthesize a 64-polyphonic sound in real time. The power consumption ranges from 2.05 to 13.8 m W depending on the level of polyphony and the sound quality.