Doc Title Wireless Smart Audio Module-A98M Series Datasheet Number WMB01152020
Version 0.3
Document No.: WMB01152020 Page 4 of 22
1. Overview
Linkplay Wireless Smart Audio module–A98M, is our 3rd. generation smart audio modules developed to be
used in the connected speaker, sound bar and other connected audio devices. It supports both ‘voice built-in’ and
‘work with voice’ applications. It integrates the low power Broadcom BCM43456 Wi-Fi/BT chip and Amlogic
A113X application processor that is designed for the connected audio applications. It integrates a powerful CPU
subsystem, advanced multi-format audio processing unit, a secured running environment and all major peripherals
to form the low power audio SoC.
The main system CPU is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU with L1 instruction/data cache for each core and
a large unified L2 cache to improve system performance. Each Cortex-A53 CPU can run up to 1.2 GHz (DVFS +
hot plug, run up to 1.2 GHz in A98M module) and has a wide bus connecting to the memory sub-system. When the
system is suspended, the main CPU can be powered off and the cortex-M3 in the always-on power domain can
resume the system from multiple interrupt sources to achieve very low power consumption.
The audio processing engine (APE) is based on ARM® NEONTM general-purpose SIMD architecture which
works seamlessly with the main CPU to accelerate the multimedia processing algorithm and enhance the user
experience. It is able to decode all major high-resolution audio formats including MP3, AAC, WMA, RM, FLAC,
Ogg, etc. with the flexibility to support future audio encoding/decoding standards and processing.
The module supports all standard audio input/output interfaces including multiple TDM, PCM, I2S and SPDIF
digital audio input/output interfaces, and 8 channel far-field PDM digital microphone (DMIC) inputs. Audio input
has power detector to wake up from low activity states. It also has the dedicated hardware assisted synchronization
blocks for the multiple room audio applications. Besides, audio input data can be restricted to trusted memory space
to protect always-on audio privacy.
The module supports IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac 1x1 dual band 2.4 GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi and BT5.0 with EDR
and BLE. It also provides USB, I2S, I2C, PDM, SPI, UART etc. interfaces to control various types of peripheral
devices.
The Linkplay embedded firmware is secure, pre-certified for many voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa voice
services (AVS), Tencent Xiaowei, Naver Clova, Baidu DuerOS, Yandex Alice etc. among others. It also supports
Apple Airplay 2, Spotify connect and numerous other music contents such as Spotify, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music,
Tidal, TuneIn, Deezer and many others. It’s also compatible with digital living network alliance (DLNA) streaming
standards. It supports Hi-Fi audio up to 192KHz, 24-bit with the most popular audio formats. It supports multi-room
and multi-channel audio streaming with perfect synchronization.
In addition, the embedded software supports the audio front end processing such as acoustic echo cancellation
(AEC) and denoising for voice UI and the sophisticated EQ processing for the high quality audio playback.
With this module, you can play the music on your speaker wirelessly from iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Android
devices or PC. More important, it enables the traditional speaker system to become the Internet enabled device
through the wired or wireless connection provided by the module. Thus, you could freely play any Internet audio
contents such as music, podcast, radio or either the accompany audio in the movie directly from the Internet.
Features
Amlogic A113X application processor
128MB DRAM (with 256MB, 512MB options)
