Vehicle computer system with audio entertainment system

• US 20050209719A1
• Filed: 05/18/2005
• Published: 09/22/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 01/07/1998
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Li, Hang, Moeller, Mark M., Beckert, Richard D.
• Granted Patent: US 7,433,974 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 700/94
• CPC Class Codes: B60R 16/0315 using multiplexing techniques multiplexing for transmission of signals G08C15/00; multiplexing for electrical communication in general H04J
• CPC Class Codes: B60R 2016/0322 Temporary code for documents to be reclassified to G08C, H04L or H04Q

Abstract

A vehicle computer system has an audio entertainment system implemented in a logic unit and audio digital signal processor (DSP) independent from the host CPU. The audio entertainment system employs a set of ping/pong buffers and direct memory access (DMA) circuits to transfer data between different audio devices. Audio data is exchanged using a mapping overlay technique, in which the DMA circuits for two audio devices read and write to the same memory buffer. The computer system provides an audio manager API (application program interface) to enable applications running on the computer to control the various audio sources without knowing the hardware and implementation details of the underlying sound system. Different audio devices and their drivers control different functionality of the audio system, such as equalization, volume controls and surround sound decoding. The audio manager API transfers calls made by the applications to the appropriate device driver(s). The computer system also supports a speech recognition system. Speech utterances are picked up by a microphone and sampled at an internal sampling rate. However, the speech recognition system employs a lower sampling rate. The computer system converts microphone data from the higher internal sampling rate to the desired sampling rate by piggybacking the microphone data on command/message streams to an SPI (serial peripheral interface) of the audio DSP. The DSP performs normal low-pass filtering and down sampling on the data stream and then uses the SPI to send out the microphone data at the lower sampling rate.

Claims

1. An entertainment system comprising:

a data memory;

a logic unit coupled to receive audio data from one or more peripheral audio sources;

a data processor to process the audio data;

the logic unit having one or more audio source direct memory access (DMA) circuits associated with corresponding ones of the peripheral audio sources, each audio source DMA circuit writing the audio data received from the associated peripheral audio source to a storage area within the data memory; and

the logic unit also having a data processor DMA circuit associated with the data processor to read the audio data from the storage area within the data memory for transfer to the data processor.

2. An entertainment system as recited in claim 1, further comprising a synchronization circuit to synchronize a first rate at which the audio source DMA circuit writes the audio data into the data memory with a second rate at which the data processor DMA circuit reads the audio data from the data memory.

3. An entertainment system as recited in claim 1, wherein the logic unit concurrently transfers audio data from multiple different audio sources to the data processor for concurrent processing.

4. A vehicle computer system comprising an entertainment system as recited in claim 1.

5. A vehicle computer system comprising:

an audio data processor;

an I/O memory;

a first memory access circuit associated with a first data source to transfer first audio data from the first data source to a first location in the I/O memory;

a second memory access circuit associated with a second data source to transfer second audio data from the second data source to a second location in the I/O memory; and

a third memory access circuit associated with the audio data processor to transfer the first and second audio data from the first and second locations in the I/O memory to the audio data processor for concurrent processing and output to one or more audio destinations.

6. A vehicle computer system as recited in claim 5, wherein the first audio data is output to a first set of speakers and the second audio data is simultaneously output to a second set of speakers.