ISD Announces Availability of 3-volt, Long Duration Record and Playback Chip For Communication Devices

A leading manufacturer of integrated circuits for voice record and playback solutions, ISD has already accounted for seven new design wins with major cellular and portable phone manufacturers worldwide. These customer commitments to ISD's new ISD33000 series have all taken place since the product family was announced last July.

Earlier versions of ISD's record and playback chips were used in cellular phones and are still being integrated into Motorola's Micro-TAC Elite, to provide an answering machine function, and Panasonic's GSM cellular telephones as a voice memo pad and 'on the fly' recording function. They were also used in Philips' cellular telephone to provide an outgoing message. In addition, ISD's ChipCorder^® technology has been incorporated into hundreds of other products, including pagers, personal voice organizers, telephone answering devices, greeting cards, games, toys, interactive books, alarms, point-of-sale displays, novelty items and personalized gifts.

"The single chip ISD33000 series, with long recording durations, low voltage requirements, and excellent sound quality was designed to be the solution for the portable phone market," said David Angel, Chairman and CEO of ISD. "The acceptance of our technology by a number of the worlds' top portable phone manufacturers demonstrates that ISD not only offers the most optimal solution for adding voice record and playback functionality to portable phones, but also that ISD's products are becoming increasingly valuable to end-users as cellular phone usage becomes more sophisticated."

ISD's new ISD33000 ChipCorder Series is optimized for both analog and digital cellular phones — including Global System Mobile (GSM), Personal Communication Service (PCS), Personal Handy Phone System (PHS), Japanese Digital Cellular (JDC), and cordless phones that rely on 3-volt technologies to minimize power consumption. ISD's single-chip solutions are designed to be integrated into phones to serve as built-in answering machines, voice memo pads, and provide 'on the fly' recording functionality. ISD also expects the ISD33000 chips to be integrated into voice pagers, personal voice organizers, personal digital assistants, portable instrumentation equipment, and traffic information storage. In addition to cellular and portable phones, the ISD33000 has also already been designed into pocket recorders and telephone answering machines.

Along with offering true 3-volt (2.7 to 3.3V) operation, the new ISD33000 product family offers longer recording durations than previous ISD products: up to four minutes. Because it is based on a new ISD chip architecture, the ISD33000 series can be quickly integrated into portable products, ultimately decreasing design time and time to market. Specifically, the series offers a highly integrated serial interface, minimizing pin count and circuit traces. Like all ISD devices, the ISD33000 products do not require battery power to retain recorded messages and messages can be recorded and re-recorded reliably over 100,000 times.

A new AutoMute™ feature has been added into the ISD33000 series to virtually eliminate any background noise occurring during playback of silent periods or pauses in audio recordings. As in all ChipCorder products, the ISD33000 provides excellent sound quality due to its proprietary direct storage technology and on-chip filters. The CMOS ISD33000 chips also integrate a nonvolatile memory array, oscillator and audio amplifier to provide a complete record and playback system-on-a-chip for portable phones.

Serial Protocols

The ISD33000 series is the first ChipCorder series to support serial protocols, including Motorola's Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) and National's Microwire. This support required a total re-architecture of chip control and logic. Serial interfaces have three major advantages over parallel. First, serial interface chips are easier to integrate due to fewer pins and consequently fewer circuit traces. Second, because chips can be designed in closer proximity to one another, less board space is consumed. Lastly, serial interfaces require fewer dedicated pins from a microcontroller. To further simplify the ISD33000 series design cycle, the company offers software code, written in "C" language, designed to provide message management and control functions for microcontrollers.

CES attendees can view the ISD33000 product line at booth #20760, located in the Sands Convention Center.

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