Professor Jeong Ik-joo of the Department of Electronics at Kangwon National University and the faculty startup ANCT (Active Noise Control Technology) jointly developed the country's first customized Active Noise Control (ANC) chip. The newly developed ANC chip is a single-chip form based on Texas Instruments (TI)'s dual-core microcontroller unit (MCU), supporting multi-channel ANC, which is known to be difficult to implement due to excessive computational load, allowing use in various application areas. Additionally, it can be effectively applied to reduce not only periodic noise but also irregular noise.
The existing ANC technology requires acoustic information from the space where the product is used and needs to be optimized accordingly, making it challenging to develop universal ANC chips. Consequently, universal ANC chips have not been commercialized outside of specific applications such as earphones or headphones. Due to the lack of universal ANC chips, corporations attempting to develop ANC application products have had to collaborate with specialized ANC companies from the early development stages, significantly increasing the burden of initial development costs.
In this development, a GUI-based tuning software was also developed, allowing users to easily estimate the acoustic information of the application environment and optimize the chip's performance accordingly. Through this software, application product developers can optimize the ANC chip to suit the environment.
Meanwhile, ANCT also released an evaluation kit to assess the newly developed ANC chip. It is expected that the development of customized ANC chips will further activate application products utilizing ANC technology in the future.