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| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1984 |
| Headquarters | San Jose,California |
Key people | Dr. Saied Tehrani: President & CEO John Marsh: Chief Financial Officer |
| Products | DACs and ADCs for audio applications, multimedia |
| Website | www.esstech.com |
ESS Technology Incorporated is aprivate manufacturer of computermultimedia products, AudioDACs andADCs based inFremont, California with R&D centers inKelowna,British Columbia, Canada andBeijing, China. It was founded byForrest Mozer in 1983. Robert L. Blair is the CEO and President of the company.[1]
Historically, ESS Technology was most famous for their line of Audiodrive chips for audio cards. Now they are known for their line of Sabre DAC and ADC products.
ESS Technologies was founded in 1983 as Electronic Speech Systems, by ProfessorForrest Mozer, a space physicist at theUniversity of California, Berkeley andTodd Mozer, Forrest Mozer's son, andJoe Costello, the former manager of National Semiconductors Digitalker line of talking chips. Costello left soon after the formation and started Cadence Designs with his former boss from National.Fred ChanVLSI designer and software engineer,[citation needed] inBerkeley, California, joined in 1985, and took over running the company in 1986 when Todd Mozer left for graduate school.
The company was created at least partially as a way to market Mozer's speech synthesis system (described in US patents 4,214,125, 4,433,434 and 4,435,831) after his (3-year, summer 1978 to summer 1981, extended) contract with National Semiconductor expired in 1983 or so.
Electronic Speech Systems produced synthetic speech for, among other things, home computer systems like theCommodore 64. Within the hardware limitations of that time, ESS used Mozer's technology, in software, to produce realistic-sounding voices that often became the boilerplate for the respective games. Two popularsound bites from the Commodore 64 were "He slimed me!!" fromGhostbusters and Elvin Atombender's "Another visitor. Stay a while—stay forever!" in the originalImpossible Mission.
At some point, the company moved fromBerkeley toFremont, California. Around that time, the company was renamed to ESS Technology.
Later, in 1994,Forrest Mozer's sonTodd Mozer, an ESS employee, branched off and started his own company called Sensory Circuits Inc, laterSensory, Inc. to marketspeech recognition technology.[2]
In the mid-1990s, ESS started working on making PC audio, and later, video chips, and created theAudiodrive line, used in hundreds of different products. Audiodrive chips were at least nominallyCreativeSound Blaster Pro compatible. Many Audiodrive chips also featured in-house developed, OPL3-compatible FM synthesizers (brandedESFM Synthesizers). These synthesizers were often reasonably faithful to theYamaha OPL3 chip, which was an important feature for the time as some competing solutions, including Creative's ownCQM synthesis featured in later ISA Sound Blaster compatibles, offered sub-par FM sound quality. Some PCI-interface Audiodrives (namely the ES1938 Solo-1) also provided legacy DOS compatibility through DistributedDMA and theSB-Link interface.[citation needed]
In 2001 ESS acquired a small Kelowna design company (SAS) run by Martin Mallinson and continues R&D operations in Kelowna. The Kelowna R&D Center developed the Sabre range of DAC and ADC products that are used in many audio systems and cell phones.
Forrest Mozer continues his research work at the University of California, these days as Associate Director of Space Sciences. He was awarded EGU Hannes Alfven Medallist 2004 for his work in electrical field measurement and space plasma and also was involved in building the microphone to record sounds from the Mars Lander. He is a member of the board of directors of Sensory, Inc.
Fred Chan held a number of positions at ESS, and was CEO ofVialta, an internet offshoot of ESS, until his stepping down on July 18, 2007, to pursue philanthropic interests.[citation needed]
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Most recently, ESS SABRE DACs are used in theLG V10 smartphone, with a quad DAC configuration present in the V10's successorLG V20. A slightly upgraded version of the same DAC in the V20, the SABRE ES9218P,[4] is used in theV30 as well as the V40 ThinQ. The ESS9038Pro is their flagship and competes against Japanese AKM (Asahi Kasei Microdevices) AK4499EXEQ and American Cirrus Logic CS43131 for a share of the market. ESS and AKM dominate the desktop audiophile devices including external DACs and integrated all in one DAC/Amp devices. Meanwhile Cirrus Logic dominates the portable device market,[5] Apple Inc is its number one customer accounting for approximately 83% of its chip sales.
The luxurySennheiser HE 1 electrostatic headphone[6] utilizes 8 internal DACs of the SABRE ES9018.
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