Winbond / Nuvoton Voice Recorder Chips

[German_EE]

This company are based in Taiwan and they manufacture what seems to be a useful range of solid state voice recording chips with recording length up to sixteen minutes. HOWEVER, EEV Blog readers need to be aware of the following:

1) The documentation for the chips consists of poorly formatted pdf files with numerous errors, some of which are fatal to the chip if the datasheets are followed.

2) There are no instructions or details concerning the memory map of the storage area as this is considered by Nuvoton to be "confidential information". If you therefore want to wipe individual messages from the chip you're therefore on your own.

3) Nuvoton are unwilling to support or even release information to hobbyists and individual users of their chips, you therefore need to either lie about being a company (and use a company email address) or struggle.

I have been struggling for the last two weeks to get one of their chips to work correctly after blowing the first one up due to a mistake in the datasheet. After being dumped by their technical support staff the second chip is now in the trash and I strongly urge EEV Blog readers to avoid this company's products.

[timb]

If you were calling "Novatron" no wonder they hung up on you! The actual company is called Nuvoton. ;-)

Some History:

Originally there was a company called Integrated Storage Devices who, in the early 90's, came out with a line of pretty revolutionary voice recording ICs based on their patented DAST, or Direct Analog Storage Technology.

Basically, they used a modified EEPROM process; instead of using a comparator to map high and low thresholds of a charge level to 0s and 1s (like a conventional EEPROM), they literally took analog data (audio) and stored each sample as a charge (voltage level) in the floating gates. This got you pretty good audio quality, without the expense of A/D-D/A converters and the associated circuitry.

Pretty fucking clever, right?

Anyway, they got bought by Winbond in the late 90's.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people will recognize one of their early flagship voice ICs, the ISD1000A, available at your friendly neighborhood Tandy/Radio Shack for only $29.95!




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[nowlan]

After the talkin multimeter thread, I was interested in some more talking/voice chips.

The TTS256 Speak-jet voice chip on spark fun is horrific ($22) as seen on youtube.
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9811

Which chips are used in speak&spell or greeting cards?

[German_EE]

Apologies for the error, the post title has been corrected.

[timb]

After the talkin multimeter thread, I was interested in some more talking/voice chips.

The TTS256 Speak-jet voice chip on spark fun is horrific ($22) as seen on youtube.
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9811

Which chips are used in speak&spell or greeting cards?

Those are two completely different things.

Greeting cards primarily use Nuvoton ICs. This type of chip is literally storing several seconds of audio for playback; like you playing an MP3 on your computer. They're generally sold as bare die and pre-programmed during manufacture. (Because Hallmark buys hundreds of thousands at a time.)

The Speak&Spell uses a TTS chip, the TI TMS5100, which is basically a DSP that reads phonemes from ROM.

TI sold off the TTS division/products in the early 2000's. =(

If you really want to play with TTS, I've seen some projects that turn an ATmega328/Arduino and speaker into a simple TTS system.

Hmmm, you know, I think I've got an old Speak N Spell board around here. I should see if I can get that IC going!


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