Akustica, a US start-up targeting microphone chips for voice-over-IP, announced its first product yesterday, a single chip MEMS device for use in notebook computers.

“We’ve been working on this for four years," Jim Rock, chief executive officer of Akustica, told the Globalpress Summit Conference in Monterey yesterday.

“It’s aimed at the notebook market for enabling the VOIP services of VOIP provides like E-bay/Skype, GoogleTalk and Yahoo. One of the missing links for VOIP service is decent, affordable microphones.”

The Akustica chip sells for $3.67 in quantities of 1,000. The speech processing algorithm is not on the chip leaving the system designer free to choose whichever is required.

"Microsoft’s Vista (its next operating system) has many voice algorithms built in," said Rock.

Akustica’s MEMS technology was licensed from Carnegie Mellon university and allows for fab-agnostic CMOS processing.

Akustica sees it as widely applicable in other areas besides microphones and is open to licensing deals.

www.akustica.com