The sad thing is for a world first SoC one feels this might have qualified for a celebratatory new package (red? green?). In years of writing about Wolfson's amazing technology advancing devices, there only been one change to identifier product pictures, the numerics. This first SOC comes the classie nomenclature WM5100.

 “As audio components in mobile phones and tablet PCs increasingly become dis-integrated from the application processor, the demand is growing for separate Audio SoCs," says Duncan Macadie, product line manager for Audio Hubs at Wolfson Microelectronics.

" Wolfson is leading the way with the WM5100, the world’s first Audio SoC with integrated full transmit path, receive path and adaptive ANC and AEC technology.

“The WM5100 manages to combine the latest low power Audio Hub, DSP, noise cancelling and echo cancelling technology to significantly improve audio record and playback quality and battery life, as well as solve a major problem in the mobile phone industry: enabling the user to make and receive consistently highly intelligible calls, whether in a quiet room or a noisy environment.”

Crucially for consumer electronic manufacturers, having all these features packed in one device reduces bill of materials cost and PCB footprint. Modular architecture design, software compatibility and agnosticism to different operating systems, makes design-in quicker, enabling faster time-to-market new products.

WM5100 also delivers  network operator benefits with increased revenues, since the solution results in less dropped calls due to listening problems in noisy environments.