NEC Electronics Europe Announces New SAY IT! Demonstration Kit

Makes adding voice synthesis to systems easy

DUESSELDORF (Germany), August 21, 2008 – NEC Electronics Europe announces the release of the SAY IT! Demonstration Kit, designed to help developers to adopt voice synthesis function in their applications. The SAY IT! demonstration kit is an out-of-the-box solution and includes all required hardware and software components to demonstrate the features of voice synthesis. Thus it offers a complete, easy to use solution requiring minimal external components.

The system is built on the super low power, high performance 16-bit 78K0R core microcontroller from the 78K0R/KG3 family. The MCU offers up to 256K bytes of flash memory and 12KB of RAM, 20MHz operating frequency and a wide supply voltage range from 1.8-5.5V. The 78K0R/KG3 microcontroller includes a lot of useful peripherals on-chip to support different applications and save cost on external components. Some of the components constituting the chip are 16x16 hardware multiplier, buzzer output controller, BCD adjustment, and wide selection of serial interfaces, ADCs, DACs, 10 timers and more. The 78K0R/KG3 outputs voice signal using either one of the channels of the internal 8-bit DACs or one of the seven available on-chip 16-bit PWM timers.

The kit is supplied with the Audio Data Conversion Tool (CvADPCM) used to convert and download voice data on to the board using the USB port. The CvADPCM is a software tool, running as a Windows™ application on a PC and is used to convert WAVE files (PCM) into the required frequency with the file format of IAR Workbench loadable source code. The Adaptive Differential PCM (ADPCM) compression /decompression library for firmware is also provided in the kit. The library is extremely compact middleware, built in the IAR environment and is available free of charge for 8-, 16- and 32-bit microcontrollers from NEC Electronics.

The board also benefits from a high number of additional components to support the demonstrations of the provided application examples, including 4-way mini joystick, illuminance sensor, speaker, sound filter, headphone connector and others. The kit is supplied together with example programs and voice samples. The IAR Workbench Kickstart compiler version is also included in the kit. The 78K0R/KG3 provides an on-chip debug interface which allows direct debugging via USB connection without using any external components.

The new SAY IT! demonstration kit is available now

NEC Electronics, NEC Electronics (Europe) and NEC Electronics America are either registered trademarks or trademarks of NEC Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other marks are property of their respective owners. All products and services mentioned in this release are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

About NEC Electronics (Europe) GmbH
NEC Electronics (Europe) GmbH, headquartered in Duesseldorf, Germany, is a leading developer and supplier of semiconductor products in Europe. Committed to meeting customers' cost, performance and time-to-market requirements, the company offers solutions ranging from standard products to system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions, as well as customized products for next-generation designs. Our customers also benefit from state-of-the-art manufacturing from the global production network of our parent company, NEC Electronics Corporation. Additionally, NEC Electronics (Europe) GmbH is the exclusive European sales and marketing channel of LCD modules from NEC LCD Technologies Ltd.. For more information visit http://www.eu.necel.com.