Leading Taiwan-based semiconductor company licenses Sonic Network audio synthesis for multimedia ICs aimed at worldwide cellphone market

Boston, MA and HsinChu, Taiwan --- Sonic Network, Inc., a provider of audio synthesizer technology, and Alpha Imaging Technology Company, a major producer of highly integrated camera phone multimedia ICs, announced today that Sonic Network’s EAS™ (embedded Audio Synthesis) technology will be utilized in AIT’s next generation multimedia devices to provide high quality audio synthesis for mobile ringtone and game audio. AIT currently supplies top OEM/ODM phone makers in Taiwan and Korea with products built into phones by Motorola, BenQ, Siemens, Philips, Panasonic, NEC, etc. Their single chip solutions support the booming camera phone market by providing camera ISP, JPEG, MPEG4, H263, MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, 2D/3D graphics, and JAVA MIDP2.0 hardware acceleration.

Andy Tsai, Director of Product Planning of AIT states “Sonic Network’s mature and complete solution is a natural complement to our multimedia IC’s. However, most important to us was the quality and compactness of the solution. Based on our bench tests, Sonic Network provided the best sound quality and the smallest memory and processor requirements, important features for competing in the increasingly aggressive cellular market.”

Jennifer Hruska, founder and president of Sonic Network said “Wireless ODMs are continuing to push multi-media IC manufactures for greater functionality and larger feature sets on their co-processors. Since both AIT and Sonic offer the widest range of format support, our technology is a natural complement that can offer tremendous value to a handset manufacturer. This is becoming most important to ODMs competing in the feature phone market. The low memory requirements of Sonic’s EAS allows substantial cost reductions over using other software solutions as well as even greater savings over utilizing a dedicated hardware solution such as a melody chip.”

About Sonic:

Sonic Network provides embedded audio software solutions to mobile device and semiconductor designers and manufactures. Its products are market proven in tens of millions of devices worldwide, from cellphones and semiconductors to personal computers and games to professional audio equipment and music synthesizers. The company also produces a premier line of retail sound libraries, endorsed by Hollywood’s leading film and television composers and enjoyed by tens of thousands of musicians worldwide.

About EAS:

Sonic Network's Embedded Audio System (EAS) technology is a multi-platform audio engine for a variety of embedded audio systems and devices such as semiconductors, wireless handsets, PDAs, sound cards, toys, and other consumer devices. The EAS solution is a customizable software package comprised of a digital audio player, General MIDI (GM) synthesizer, matched wavetable soundsets, and audio extensions for multiple MIDI formats, digital audio effects, mixers, audio codecs, and graphics integration.

About Alpha Imaging Technology:

Alpha Imaging Technology (AIT) provides cost effective highly integrated multimedia ICs to mobile phone manufacturers. Since founded in Nov. 2002, AIT had launched three generations of multimedia ICs, with solutions covering from low-end camera phones to high-end multimedia phones. AIT’s products have been built into millions of mobile phones made by Motorola, BenQ, Siemens, Philips, Panasonic, NEC, and many tier 1/tier 2 Korean phone makers for Asia and European market.

About Microsoft:

Sonic Network’s EAS™ (embedded Audio Synthesis) technology was developed using Microsoft's Visual Studio 2003 platform.