MediaTek Launches Chipset Supporting Voice Assistants
MediaTek has introduced its newest full-featured chipset designed to enable voice assistant devices (VADs) and smart speakers, including Google Assistant. MediaTek also announced support for MT8516-based Android Things pre-certified system on modules (SOMs).
By supporting the Google Assistant and Android Things, MediaTek is enabling seamless interaction between voice command devices and IoT products. MediaTek powers more than 1.5 billion consumer devices a year.
"Smart home products are growing in popularity and MediaTek's expertise is making connected devices smarter, smaller, and more power-efficient without sacrificing performance," said Joe Chen, executive vice president and co-chief operations officer at MediaTek, in a statement. "Our dedicated Android support will help expand the market for voice-based intelligent devices."
The MediaTek MT8516 is a highly power-efficient application processing platform. Its diverse interfaces and connectivity focuses on audio and microphone processing. It was designed specifically for cloud-supported voice assistant devices. It is equipped with a quad-core, 64-bit ARM Cortex-A35 MPCore operating at up to 1.3 GHz. The chipset also pre-integrates WiFi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0.
For microphone voice input and connected audio products, the MediaTek MT8516 has interfaces for TDM (up to eight channels) and PDM inputs (two channels). In addition, the chipset has flexible memory support including LPDDR2, LPDDR3, DDR3, DDR3L and DDR4 to accommodate diverse platform needs.
New Google Assistant devices using MT8516 are expected later this year.