Audience selected as nominee for 2008 Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Award
Audience slated as one of four nominees chosen for Start-up to Watch award category
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – December 2, 2008 – Audience today announced its selection as one of four nominees for the 2008 Global Semiconductor Alliance Start-up to Watch Award. Winners will be presented at the GSA Awards Dinner Celebration on Thursday, December 11, 2008, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, Calif.
The GSA awards program recognizes semiconductor companies that have demonstrated excellence through their vision, strategy, execution and future opportunity in the industry. The Start-Up to Watch Award is designed to identify the company that demonstrates the potential to positively change its market or the semiconductor industry in general through either the innovative use of semiconductor technology or a new application for semiconductor technology, as evaluated by the GSA Venture Capital Advisory Board.
“We are pleased to be a nominee for one of the most important semiconductor awards in the industry today,” said Peter Santos, Audience president and CEO. “This nomination is further evidence of the importance of our core technology and hardware acceleration in providing consistent, high quality mobile voice communications in any kind of noise environment.”
Audience Voice Processors are the first custom ICs that are modeled after the most efficient and accurate auditory system, the human hearing system. By understanding the auditory pathway – from the cochlea to the brainstem to the thalamus and cortex – Audience is the first company to deliver a commercial product based on the science of Computational Auditory Scene Analysis (CASA), or the grouping and processing of complex mixtures of sound. Because the Audience Voice Processor handles signals the way people actually perceive specific sounds, it is able to identify and suppress noise sources in an extremely efficient and accurate manner.
About GSA
The Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) mission is to accelerate the growth and increase the return on invested capital of the global semiconductor industry by fostering a more effective fabless ecosystem through collaboration, integration and innovation. It addresses the challenges within the supply chain including IP, EDA/design, wafer manufacturing, test and packaging to enable industry-wide solutions. Providing a platform for meaningful global collaboration, the Alliance identifies and articulates market opportunities, encourages and supports entrepreneurship, and provides members with comprehensive and unique market intelligence. Members include companies throughout the supply chain representing 25 countries across the globe. www.gsaglobal.org
About Audience
Audience is a voice processor company that enables clear communications anywhere with noise suppression technology based on the intelligence of the human hearing system. The technology is applicable across a broad range of consumer products where voice needs to be intelligible in noisy environments and is already enabling people to be heard on mobile handsets throughout Japan and Korea. Audience was the Silver Winner in the 2008 Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards and the Winner of the Semiconductor category. The company was included in Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in Semiconductors, 2008” and selected as the Most Innovative True Mobile Start-Up for the “2008 GSMA Mobile Innovation Global Awards.” Audience is one of 34 founding member companies of the Open Handset Alliance and the only one with advanced noise suppression technology. Investors in Audience include Vulcan Capital, NEA, Tallwood Venture Capital and VentureTech Alliance. Audience, www.audience.com, is based in Mountain View, California.