Sound-tracing chip company Exarion said on Thursday that it has signed a multi-project wafer service contract with Asicland, a design house partner of TSMC, for the production of a 12-nanometer (nm) prototype.
Exarion’s sound-tracing chip will be made using the Taiwanese chip foundry’s 12nm process and launch approximately in August, the South Korean company said. Earlier, it verified its design on a field programmable gate array.
The technology adopts a similar structure as ray tracing used in GPUs to collect realistic images.
Instead of tracing the path of virtual light, sound-tracing tracks the path of sound to offer realistic sound effects.
Exarion said its technology can distinguish sound emitting from left to right, from top to bottom, while the sound will also change depending on what virtual surface it is reflected from.
Like ray-tracing, sound-tracing also requires a large amount of data to be calculated in real-time.
Exarion said its designated 12nm chip has a very small size of 0.3cm x 0.3cm and can process massive amounts of sound data at low power.
The company said its chip can be applied to XR devices like the Apple Vision Pro as well as other consumer electronics such as smartphones, TVs, and headsets.
Exarion showcased the technology at CES 2024 earlier this year, where it said companies such as Sony, Mobileye, Volvo, ZOOX, Nextbase, Audiokinetic, and others showed interest.
