PORTLAND, Ore. -- Akustica is entering the mobile device market with its first analog microphone, a low-cost two-chip solution that it hopes will widen its market share.
The Bosch subsidiary pioneered the single-chip digital MEMS microphone back in 2006, when its biggest competition was analog mics designed for hearing aids.
Akustica is the world leader in digital MEMS microphones with its elegant one-chip CMOS solution that has captured the lion's share of the microphone market for digital devices like laptop computers. However, the larger mobile phone market has been slow to adopt digital microphones, opting instead to stick with the ultra-inexpensive analog microphones produced by high-volume manufacturers like Knowles Acoustics (Itaska, Ill.). Now Akustica, backed by Bosch's high-volume manufacturing capabilities, hopes to carve out a bigger share of the billion-unit mobile phone market.
