Moving Beyond Audio Roots, Xperi Previews Latest, Next-Gen Tech at CES

Now under the Xperi corporate umbrella, DTS “has broadened meaningfully -- some through M&A and other activities -- beyond the audio space into imaging, semiconductors and beyond,” Kirchner said. Within its car business, it moved from a DVD-based entertainment experience to an “automotive franchise” that adds to radio platforms next-generation in-cabin monitoring and imaging technologies.

The Xperi umbrella also covers the Tessera and Invensas semiconductor subsidiaries, FotoNation's imaging business, Play-Fi multiroom audio, the IMAX-enhanced partnership and TiVo, which it announced plans last month to combine with in a $3 billion deal (see 1912190049). Kirchner will head the combined company, which will assume the Xperi name but continue to provide entertainment services under the TiVo brand, alongside Xperi’s existing brands.

The Xperi vision focuses on more technology convergence and advanced integrated solutions across its different segments, “part of the reason we think the semi business is helpful as well,” said Kirchner. He paused at the semiconductor section of the booth to tout Invensas' DBI Ultra die-to-wafer hybrid bonding that increases connections in a stack of imaging chips from 625 per square to 100,000. Xperi has been employing DBI in image sensors for mobile phones; it’s eyeing the memory market for DBI Ultra: “We think it has relevance in RF, MEMS, logic … anywhere people are looking to build more compute power into a smaller footprint, going vertical.”

In automotive at CES, Kirchner and Jeff Jury, general manager-automotive, keyed on the company’s longstanding HD Radio business and its fledgling Connected Radio platform, due to hit the roads this year, and on future safety-focused in-vehicle imaging technologies.

HD Radio, Xperi’s terrestrial radio technology, is at more than 50 percent penetration in all new vehicles in the U.S., with all 41 car brands supporting it, Jury said. DTS’ cellular-based Connected Radio delivers local radio content, relevant metadata, a live guide for use with streaming channels and a return channel that could enable occupants to hit a button to like a song or buy an advertised product or content.

Byton announced at CES it's using the two radio technologies combined in its M-Byte electric vehicle due in the U.S. next year. The car company positioned HD Radio as offering “crystal-clear digital audio” supported by 2,300 radio stations and Connected Radio as a technology that allows automatic switching to a station's IP audio stream when the vehicle leaves the terrestrial broadcast coverage area.

DTS Connected Radio is expected to reach the market this year, but Xperi can’t announce which vehicles until its OEMs do. At its booth, Xperi showed Alpine, Panasonic and Hyundai Mobis as among the seven OEMs showing the technology at CES. “Some were private,” said Jury, “because they didn’t want to reveal their HMI’s [human machine interface] to the competition.”

Connected Radio as Premium Offering

Connected Radio is expected to be a premium offering but one that’s routine as part of an option package, said Jury: “If you’re one of these new electric car companies, known as phones on wheels, it’s easy to integrate these technologies.”

Connected Radio takes Xperi’s automotive entertainment business global, while HD Radio, primarily a North American play, is bound by broadcast standards, said Kirchner. Connected Radio is a "big business opportunity,” he said, and advances the broadcast industry in a way “they’ve been looking to figure out.”

On how 5G fits into the Connected Radio picture, Jury said the technology will work with the next-gen networks, “but you’re going to need every possible pipe you can to bring content to the car because you can’t rely on any one pipe.” There will always be a need for over-the-air broadcasts because it’s inexpensive and “the most efficient one-to-many channel out there.” Depending on a car’s location, the cellular connection could be 5G, 3G or 2G, he said: “Over the air supplements that. It will always be an integral part of what they’re doing.”

The Connected Radio feed is available now in New York, Tokyo and Auckland, New Zealand, allowing DTS customers to test and troubleshoot product in development. Systems are due in the market this year.

Xperi and Visteon showed next-gen in-cabin monitoring technologies in Las Vegas that use facial recognition to detect a driver’s attention level, monitoring whether a driver’s eyes blink, close or if the eye’s view changes direction. Xperi’s FotoNation database enables imaging that tracks more than 65 points on a face. “We know where she’s looking, if she’s distracted and if she’s looking where she should be,” said Jury.

Denso is using FotoNation’s facial recognition technology, built on 15-20 years of experience in photography and mobile devices, in vehicles for Asian markets to track head orientation, eye-open levels, eye position and gaze and drowsiness, Jury said. Those same data points may extend in the future to gauge emotion -- whether vehicle occupants are happy or sad -- and feed data to the entertainment system to deliver mood-matching music. Car occupants could have profiles so music starts playing geared to driver’s and passenger’s tastes, Kirchner added.

Xperi is banking on future vehicles having multiple cameras placed in various vehicle locations for different purposes. “You walk up to your car, it knows it’s you, unlocks the car and cues up your favorite radio stations,” Kirchner said. “I never have to touch anything; it just knows,” he said. “All the tier ones are thinking how they want to do it; we want to give them the platform to flexibly build their camera designs where it makes sense, and translate them into results.”

'Opens Up the World'

With cameras throughout the cabin, “it opens up the world of what you can do, but technology has to be that much more sophisticated,” Jury said, saying camera sensors have to interpret where and how people are sitting and then relay that information back to the occupants. “Is there a baby in back? Is it a box, a dog or a baby? All this matters. If you can prevent someone from getting out of the car and leaving a baby in the car, it’s worth it.”

Xperi’s OEM customers are now three-to-five years out in the design cycle of vehicles that will increasingly employ in-cabin monitoring, said Kirchner. The technology will come in two flavors: occupancy, where all passengers are monitored for safety purposes, and driver-centric monitoring for eye gaze, drowsiness, “looking in the wrong direction, if you’re drunk, you’re high," said the CEO. "All these things can be measured if you have the right kind of sensors.”

In home audio, Xperi is seeing “traction” for DTS:X and DTS Virtual:X for TVs, where uptake from TV makers looking to beef up sound in flat TVs has been “very good,” Kirchner said. It’s still taking on Dolby at the cinema and in the home, but Kirchner sees Dolby taking a broader-based approach with immersive sound. Dolby has been heavily promoting Dolby Atmos as a mainstream immersive audio technology in theaters, in AV receivers, sound bars and phones, while DTS is focused on providing the audio for IMAX Enhanced soundtracks and decoders in theaters and home theater gear. “We’re pursuing the highest quality entertainment experience possible” on the content creation and playback sides, Kirchner said.

DTS has five streaming partners for IMAX Enhanced -- Fandango Now, Rakuten in Europe, Sony’s Privilege 4K app, Tsutaya in Japan and Tencent in China, said Kirchner. IQiyi in China is also coming on board. In hardware, most AV receiver companies support IMAX Enhanced along with select Sony and TCL TVs.

Asked if DTS plans a music initiative similar to Dolby’s with the Atmos Music surround-sound format, Kirchner cited DTS' decades-old experiment with music surround sound in the 1990s. “We occasionally release surround music projects, but we’re still thinking the reality is most consumers are not going to listen to music on discrete 5.1 systems,” he said. Instead, he referenced the DTS Headphone:X technology that takes stereo content and expands into a surround experience or sends discrete 5.1-channel content through standard stereo headsets. “It’s still early days for music” in the surround space, Kirchner said, where interest is on video, movies or games, he said.

The Play-Fi program is “taking a bit of a turn,” said Kirchner after Xperi’s hopes for growth in the wireless multiroom audio market -- still dominated by Sonos -- haven’t met expectations. Xperi has 28 brand licensees for Play-Fi, many high-end audio-focused -- but the company is also embedding the technology into TVs via software. “All of a sudden, the TV can become part of the whole-home experience,” he said. So far that’s in international markets. Xperi announced in September Philips TV manufacturer TPV will integrate Play-Fi technology into TVs, sound bars and speakers for sale under the Philips brand in Europe, China, Russia, Latin America, and Asia Pacific.

In some cases the TV technology is co-branded, but it’s largely being positioned as DTS wireless. Kirchner differentiated between the Play-Fi modules sold for integration in speakers and the TV solution, software running on an embedded device. The TV technology is useful for keeping the audio in sync in what he called “Super Bowl mode,” where consumers can listen, in sync, to audio from the TV through a Play-Fi speaker in the kitchen while preparing food, so they don’t have to turn up the TV volume to hear the game.

“We still believe wireless has legs; we believe it’s relevant to where we’re going,” Kirchner said. But progress DTS has made on the embedded front “is more of what the marketplace wants from us as a third-party provider,” he said. The company will continue to support its AV partners that have invested in Play-Fi “because we still believe we’re filling a niche pretty well. Over time,” he said, “we’ll see how we do.”