When you look at your headphones, earbuds, or smartglasses, odds are you don’t think about the chips inside. Here’s why you should.
xMEMS designs and manufactures tiny audio and cooling chips.
The company’s audio chips can replace entire dynamic drivers.
Despite the innovation, manufacturer adoption is still a work in progress.
Consumer technology continues to advance every year. Smartphones debut with on-device, AI-powered features, smart glasses project displays of your daily tasks, and smartwatches can help you treat a cold before you feel its wrath. However, dynamic drivers, which are inside all of these products, have remained largely unchanged over the last 100 years.
Dynamic drivers are the small transducers found inside earbuds, headphones, smartphones, smartwatches, and smart glasses, which utilize fundamental laws of physics to deliver sound to your ears. Yet, as your devices become smarter and more powerful, tech providers like xMEMS believe that your audio experiences should be equally innovative.
Therefore, the company believes its incredibly tiny MEMS chips can replace dynamic drivers across consumer technology products, providing solutions for sound, weight, and heat management to manufacturers. I spent an hour with the company’s suite of chips, and here’s how they can upgrade your devices.Dynamic drivers aren’t needed
Bose QC Ultra (left); Bose QC Ultra 2 (right).
A dynamic driver consists of a magnet, a voice coil, and a diaphragm, and it uses electrical signals to generate magnetic fields that move the diaphragm and coil, creating sound. Dynamic drivers are cost-effective, power-efficient, and leverage air displacement to reproduce the prominent bass response most consumers enjoy.
The downside to dynamic drivers is that they take up space and weight within your headphones and earbuds, and can often distort sounds at high volumes, struggling to maintain clarity.
Therefore, xMEMS‘ solution is its Cowell and Sycamore solid-state microspeakers. The Cowell microchip is already in products on the market, such as the Soundpeats Air5 Pro+ and the Creative Aurvana Ace 3.
