Look at the prevalence of Wolfson's audiochips today, in everything from audiophile DACs to smartphones like the Exynos-powered Galaxy S III and Galaxy S 4, and it's hard not to be impressed.
While it is possible to refine audio quality through software, Audience specializes in chips because it says hardware allows more computational power for its complex sound processing.
In addition to continuing to provide the audio codec chip for the iPhone, he thinks the company also scored wins with a low power codes DSP chips for noise suppression, noise cancellation and echo cancellation, as well as an audio amplifier.
Chicory already is pitching designs for accelerating the processing of video and audio streams, as well as accelerators for converting code written for cell phone chips designed by ARM, the British shop, into code that can be read by Pentiums and other chips.