Digital Amplifying by Texas instruments

They’ve almost won the bet!

Texas Instruments who develop DLP chips for many of the major projector brands have announced they’re going to be attacking the digital audio amplifier market.
The announcement was made on the official site of the US-based manufacturer. This new process, which follows on from what we were able to discover at the last CES show, is a further diversification for the company, allowing it to attack this booming market.

The new products which will soon be seeing the light of day come in four different models. Thus, each company using the chips developed by TI will have the choice between four quite different products. We remind you that the advantage of this technology is that of being able to drastically reduce the size of the amplifier. Moreover, another advantage of digital amplification is the response time – zero, which augers for better dynamics (at high and low levels) as well as harmonic distortion which is virtually nil.

On the technical side, TI will be proposing microprocessors capable of pumping out, depending on the product, between 50 & 100 Watts per channel, on two or six channels. In terms of size, the microprocessors will dispose of 32, 56 or 64 pins.

As indicated above, four versions are proposed to AV manufacturers wishing to attack the digital amplification market:
-TAS 5100 Chip (mono/stereo) with 32 pins, developing almost 50 watts per channel,
-TAS 5182 Chip ((mono/stereo) with 56 pins, developing almost 100 watts per channel,
-TAS 5182 Chip (mono/stereo) with 64 pins, developing almost 100 watts per channel for 96 dB,
-TAS 5182 Chip (six channels) with 64 pins, developing almost 100 watts per channel for 102 dB,


We sincerely hope that TI succeeds in this venture, which will doubtless bring about many changes for the future. This will especially be the case if this new generation of microprocessors sees the same success as TI’s DLP light engines.