Guests: 

• Peter Sung, Founder at Linsation Intelligent Technology Limited, and
• Julian Kornprobst, Marketing & Business Development Specialist for MEMS Microphones, Infineon

Moderator:  Thomas Reinhardt, Director Corporate Campaigns ＆ Customer Communication, Infineon
Date of publication: 24 November 2023

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“Actually, earbuds have become a daily companion. There are huge challenges for manufacturers, where Peter is the real expert here on talking about this.”

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Moderator:

The potential of the Internet of Things is well known. So, let’s talk with experts from infineon, partners and customers about what it takes to Make IoT work. My name is Thomas Reinhardt. I am your host, and I am excited to share this podcast with all of you.

Wireless audio technology has evolved rapidly in recent years, with the potential to revolutionize both consumer electronics and health industries. Listening to music or a podcast and watching videos, movies, and series has never been easier, and has never offered better sound quality. The reason is new semiconductor technologies in combination with new system designs and software solutions. Today, I will discuss further about the developments in and innovations in hearable technologies with my guests. Welcome Peter Sung, CEO of Linsation – a Shenzhen based company, dedicated to developing the intuitive "Sensation User Interface" experience for people. Furthermore, I am pleased to welcome my valued colleague Julian Kornprobst, who is a Marketing & Business Development Specialist for MEMS Microphones. I am very pleased that you are my guests. May I ask you to briefly introduce yourselves to our audience? Peter.

Peter Sung:

Hello, welcome to all listeners. Thanks for the invitation. This is Peter Song, CEO from Linsation. Linsation is a company who provides the unique sensation user interface for our customers. Our passion is to bring the health and happiness with the extraordinary and innovative audio technology on our carefully designed products, hearables applications or audio related domain. Thank you.

Julian Kornprobst:

Hello listeners, I am Julian. For four years I have been a part of the innovative MEMS microphone team here at Infineon. I started in product marketing and now transition more into an application marketing focused role, which allows me to dive deep into systems use cases and the devices that our sensors go into.

Moderator:

Thank you very much. It is a great combination having you, Peter, as the CEO of Linsation, and you, Julian, as a valued colleague. Then let’s start maybe with very basic questions: What exactly are hearables? Are they more headphones or more hearing aids? Are they a lifestyle product or a medical device? And how does the market for hearables look like?

Peter Sung:

So actually hearable is a common term for the general hearable device. So not only headphones, but hearing aids are also included in the hearable term. So hearable is like a wearable: anything that you can hear on your ear is a hearable. But for the consumer and for medical market, the term hearable has different definition and features. For consumers they are more focusing on the technique, spec and the personal feeling. They like the music experience and sound quality. And also many technologies can bring people new trends or a new life behavior. But the hearable, or hearing aid, for medical is different. They try to solve people’s inconvenient lives and try to help people to hear. In the hearing aid or medical application, the most important thing is not the technology feature. Technology is the basis, but we are focusing more on the service tor the people, to help them solve their inconveniences. So the focus of consumer hearables and medical hearables is different.

Moderator:

Thank you for the explanation. What I have noticed, especially in recent years, is that headphones are getting smaller and smaller and at the same time more and more technically capable. In the past, if you wanted a good listening experience without external noise, the headphones were usually huge. And they had wires. Today, they are small, wireless, still have remarkable battery life, and the sound is excellent on many devices. I would imagine that this presents some challenges for manufacturers, right, Julian?

Julian Kornprobst:

Yes, I think you got it exactly right with your observations in the headphones and earbud space. We kind of like to think in evolutionary steps. So I mean you remember from back in the day when music became portable with the Walkman, right. So that was one step. But as you said, you had still quite big headphones or a big headset. And that changed a bit with the advent of wired earbuds in the late 90s and early 2000s, which was driven, you know, by miniaturization of the speakers, right? But you still want it to sound good. So wired earbuds came on the scene and then really Bluetooth technology changed everything. And as you said, we got rid of the wires, so to say. So this was the first big evolutionary step and this is also where the term TWS – so True Wireless Stereo – was coined, because it means that your earbuds are actually truly wireless in the sense that they are not only connected to your device via Bluetooth, but that they are also not connected to each other with a wire. So if you think of the Airpods that were launched in 2016, this is that really kicked off the market. And the need was there. You could really see the big uptake in the market and how a new category was born.
The second evolutionary step – and this is also what I think Peter can comment on, poses huge challenges to manufacturers. The second step was that you needed to go beyond just getting rid of the wires. So in the end, earbuds are basically wireless music playing devices. This was the first step. But now you see a ton of new features in these devices: You have active noise cancelling. You go on an airplane and now your earbud can do active noise cancellation. You want the transparency mode because obviously you also want to be connected to your surroundings. You want to be able to have a phone call, maybe when you are at the bus or when you are on the bicycle, or when you are on the move in a cafeteria. You want to have a good phone conversation. So actually, earbuds have become a daily companion, right from music-only, audio-only to a truly wearable device that we have on our hands. …well, in our ears actually. And there are huge challenges for manufacturers, where, you know, Peter is the real expert here and can talk about this.

Peter Sung:

As Julian mentioned, the earbud became a real companion. So the user scenarios changed. The outside environments always change. So the sensor and the device in the earbud they need to play a different role in different situations, so to say from a manufacturer’s perspective. The issue is, when they want to integrate more sensors for so many functions, sometimes the production is challenging as you want to avoid interference between the different sensors. And you need more algorithms to integrate the sensors for more applications what is also a very difficult process. So from the manufacturer side they also develop different test methodology. You can see, the trends like technology for sensors and technology for manufacturing need excellent development to be able to meet this trend for more earbud integration.

Moderator:

So, let’s stay here for a bit. How can you as a rather young company develop products more easily?

Peter Sung:

Let’s talk about the module, because the more and more sensors are like subsystems. So as a young company, when you want to go into this field, you need to find the important niche, and then you can try to integrate this specific IoT sensor as a module. And based on this module integration and their experience, they can then easily duplicate this in the production line for each module. The same for testing. So the process will be like with a mobile phone. The earbud has become very complicated. So all the functions have to be separated as different modules to do the assembly. So we focus on some special modules to make the whole system work. And – to maybe focus more on the topic – I think of course the speaker itself is a very important part. But also the microphone element. And, Julian, this is more your area.

Julian Kornprobst:

I mean, MEMS microphones are one of the key components in a headset or an earbud. And as we have seen, you know from the history, just like for example, connectivity with Bluetooth needed to evolve, the microphones needed to evolve, too. And the technology needed to evolve. And this is where the role of our team and Infineon really came in because many earbuds and their features require of course the input from a microphone. They are at the beginning of the audio chain, as you said, Thomas. You know, they pick up the sound and they are in essence acting a bit like the ears of the device. Se be it active noise cancellation, be it voice communication, the microphone picks up the input and, when this is processed, sends it to the device. Of course, you need to be small, you want to be low in power consumption to increase the battery life and you want to have good audio quality and maybe for the listeners a quick example here: Users of an earbud will be familiar with the transparency mode, where you in essence switch on the device so that it lets the sound from your environment through, right? This is for example when you are on the street or when you are shopping so that the voices or the sounds are let through. So in essence there is a mode for when the earbud acts as your ear. And in the microphone world there is a technical term that the users called SNR, the signal to noise ratio. It is best if the listeners imagine this as the self noise of the microphone. So is there any hiss noise, some distortion coming from the electric circuitry? And if your microphone is not good, if it has a low signal to noise ratio, so a lot of noise in there, when you switch on the transparency mode, you are going to hear this as the user and everyone will understand you do not really want your ears to be hissy, right? And as such, this is one of the examples of where we with our technology not only look into and say “Ok, how can we improve the SNR so that in the end the actual user if the earbud has a better experience?” But I said, the microphone is a component and of course it has to work together with all the other components to then really give this great user experience.

Moderator:

You nailed it down to the point. I mean, it sounds really, really complex. So many components to be considered in the right manner. To choose the best setting. To of course include also software and algorithms if needed. So that brings me to the point of partnership, because not everyone can bring this expertise across all areas. The partnership between Linsation and Infineon is very important for the further development of the technology – and your aspired growth path. How did it come about? And how do the two companies complement each other in the development of cutting-edge solutions? In the spirit of: We make IoT easy for our customers?

Julian Kornprobst: 

As we alluded to before and as you, Peter, and you, Thomas, said before: No technology – especially these days – exists in a vacuum. You have to work together. We have heard it before already with the evolution of Bluetooth. You know, this is a technology that needs to be there in order to allow further development of another technology in this case of earbuds. And for our partner ecosystem, this is what we essentially look at. So, we want to partner with the best in the business and, as you said right, these are soft ware and algorithms providers, these are system integrators, it comes to testing and it comes to sensors. We from the semiconductor industry and partners in the industry work together to create something better because – and I said it – no one operates in isolation. You need this collaborative approach, which is also what is central to our Infineon’s philosophy of P2S – product to system. So, coming from the product perspective, in my case the MEMS microphones, it is then about looking at the system and this is really where Peter and Linsation came in perfectly for us.

Peter Sung:

Yes, we are living in a ecosystem. We are lucky and happy to be partner of Infineon’s ecosystem as we know that Infineon has developed many innovative solutions, sensors and technologies around the world. So Linsation is a young company and a small company and even when we have some ideas, sometimes we need a strong backup to support us to develop innovative solutions. So, the partner ecosystem is very good for us because we can handle the latest technology. Based on the technology we can co-work with more ecosystem partners to create and to find new application trends. This is real teamwork. And we are really happy to be part of Infineon’s environment.

Moderator:

These are really very exciting, forward-looking technologies. If we now take a look into the crystal ball – something we do at the end of every episode of our IoT podcast: What else does the future hold in the area of hearables, Peter?

Peter Sung:

Hearables can solve the problem many problems. Like, right now, we can easily communicate with one another around the world. It has increased the co-working situations for a lot of people to the better. And a hearable can also help people who are losing the ability to hear to hear again in the medical domain. In the future I think that sometimes a hearable can help us to recover our mind. Because nowadays we have a lot of pressure. Hearables can maybe become the dominate solutions to have a happy live.

Moderator:

That is a very good point. I mean, in one of our previous calls, you said, that audio will be everywhere one day and that is a really nice sentence. And then my last question to Julian: what can we look forward to in terms of further collaboration? Where will the journey go, Julian?

Julian Kornprobst:

So I think since we already started with Linsation on a very cutting edge topic, which was the demonstrator for bone conduction sensing, driven by Peter and our team here, we are going to build on that certainly. So, we see with the vibration sensing, bone conduction sensing that we have hit a nerve because there was a lot of interest, a lot if questions coming from our customers. So, we are going to build on this, which means, looking together with partners and with Linsation on how to drive further testing, further integration, advice to help make IoT a reality.
But also looking forward, there is going to be new sensors and better microphones that we look at and thus new use cases. As Peter said, what about hearing health? How can we make hearing aids more affordable and more widespread for those that need it? How can we look into health tracking with our sensors for example. And maybe some new use cases that we do not even know yet.

Moderator:

Thank you, Julian, for this look into the crystal ball. This brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you very much for joining. Peter – Julian: is was a pleasure talking to you.

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