The ICS-52000 is a MEMS microphone that supports up to 16 mic outputs, driving a common time division multiplexed (TDM) bus. By design, all of the ICS-52000 microphones on a common bus will sample their acoustic signals simultaneously and output their individual data words in their respective time slots in the TDM bus. Synchronized sampling is critical for the performance of a multi-microphone array because the algorithms typically used with these arrays require accurate synchronization between signals for optimum performance. Without the ICS-52000’s integrated synchronization at start-up, these DSP algorithms would require a complicated series of delays and/or buffers to pre-process the signals to achieve the best algorithm performance.
This application note describes how an array of ICS-52000 microphones is synchronized and how multiple arrays can be synchronized together. See the ICS-52000 datasheet for a complete description of the microphone’s operation and TDM interface.
