Silicon Laboratories has introduced the next generation of its Si24xx ISOmodem family, saying that it offers advanced voice features, lower power, reduced BOM costs and flexible interface options for a wide range of data modem applications.

“Our next-generation Si24xx ISOmodem family gives developers the utmost in flexibility, reliability, surge protection and advanced voice features for telephony applications,” said Carlos Garcia, vice president of Wireline products at Silicon Labs.

The Si24xx data modem ICs address the need for voice and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications for security and home automation systems, smart utility meters, set-top boxes, point-of-sale (POS) terminals and many other electronics systems that connect to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

Unlike legacy data modem solutions, the Si24xx ISOmodem family’s voice feature set offers better performance and audio fidelity. The combination of Silicon Labs’ Si3000 voice codec with the Si24xx data modems supports handset, speakerphone -- full or half-duplex -- voice menu and answering machine implementations.

Company officials said that developers can easily add telephony and voice functions to any embedded system since there is no need for the dedicated voice processing ICs or host-based DSP software required by legacy approaches.

The ISOmodem family offers a complete suite of ITU-T "V-dot" data communications, compression and error correction protocols. In addition, it also supports specialized protocols used in security and POS applications.

Si24xx family comes with the standard DTMF generation and detection and user-programmable tone detection and generation, which provide the flexibility to support non-standard custom protocols through host software.

Additionally, as part of Silicon Labs “green” solutions, the Si24xx ISOmodem family claims to offer the industry’s lowest power consumption in both active and standby modes.

Silicon Laboratories (News - Alert) is a provider of analog-intensive, mixed-signal ICs. The company’s diverse portfolio of patented semiconductor solutions offers customers significant advantages in performance, size and power consumption.

Last month, the company introduced of a power-efficient subscriber line interface circuit (SLIC) solution for voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) gateways.