Soundskrit Announces the SKR0400 Directional MEMS Microphone

By Tiera Oliver

Associate Editor

Embedded Computing Design

October 21, 2022

News

Soundskrit Announces the SKR0400 Directional MEMS Microphone

MONTREAL — Soundskrit announced the availability of the SKR0400, the world's first bio-inspired directional MEMS microphone built for consumer electronics devices. Designed to replace traditional microphone arrays, the bio-inspired SKR0400 features a new transducer to provide increased audio performance.

The SKR0400 features proprietary software to provide audio to various use cases for a variety of devices with microphones such as laptops, webcams, smart speakers, connected TVs, headsets and earbuds, AR/VR, medical devices, wearables, and connected vehicles.

Most consumer devices today house multiple omnidirectional microphones which lack the ability to isolate voice from unwelcome background noise. At the hardware level, the SKR0400 directional MEMS microphone is capable of removing unwanted noise using a highly directional pickup pattern. It also employs minimal signal processing with features such as noise and echo reduction, true stereo recording for immersive audio content, and voice tracking.

"We experienced and saw the need for elevated audio without compromises - high performance, pristine sound, and that engineered new ways for humans to experience sound and not necessarily in the same manner we process sound ourselves," said Stephane Leahy, Vice President of Hardware and Co-founder of Soundskrit. "We needed to create something small and directional, so we took inspiration from the smallest auditory systems in nature. We've created a microphone that truly isolates a speaker's voice and delivers the highest-quality sound. We're not stopping at just one microphone, Soundskrit is building and engineering audio for the future."

Soundskrit's audio sensory technology mimics the sound capture process of insects instead of humans by responding to air flow as opposed to pressure, as small auditory systems in nature use different methods to sense sound. The SKR0400 microphone transducer is based on these processes performed in nature as it moves in sync with the sound of surrounding air motion to sense incoming sound waves and converts it into an electronic signal.

In addition to Soundskrit’s audio sensory technology, the company also developed in-house AI based on the acoustics of directional microphones and advancements in neural networks. Per the company, two SKR0400 MEMS microphones provide the same expertise as four omnidirectional microphone arrays. The SKR0400 also gets rid of background noise and reverb, tracks multiple speakers around a room, and/or detects the distance of a sound from the microphones to eliminate background noise.

For more information, visit: www.soundskrit.ca

Tiera Oliver, Associate Editor for Embedded Computing Design, is responsible for web content edits, product news, and constructing stories. She also assists with newsletter updates as well as contributing and editing content for ECD podcasts and the ECD YouTube channel. Before working at ECD, Tiera graduated from Northern Arizona University where she received her B.S. in journalism and political science and worked as a news reporter for the university’s student led newspaper, The Lumberjack.

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