Deepen Sinha, co-developer of the PAC codec used by Sirius Satellite Radio and others, has announced the formation of ATC Labs, a global audio and speech technology development and services firm that will focus on next-generation audio components for Internet, broadcast and cable, and wireless networks and devices.

In addition to Sinha, who will serve as president, other primary partners include Chief Technology Advisor Dr. Anibal Ferreira, an expert in low-delay audio codecs and Chief Scientist Dr. Deep Sen, an authority on the perception of speech and music signals.

The company says that its development efforts will focus primarily on audio and speech compression codecs to be offered for licensing, but that it will also assist clients in developing, integrating and testing emerging audio and speech technologies.

On the product side, the company will offer a new suite of codec products marketed under the name Tesla Pro, including Tesla Pro Audio: a high fidelity stereo audio codec operating at 48kb/s. The codec is adaptable to stereo bit rates as low as 32kb/s and high quality mono in the 20-24kb/s range.

Tesla Pro Speech is geared toward the coding of speech signals in the 4-12kb/s and is distinguished by high level of robustness to background noise and music. It also offers wide-band capabilities (8kHz or higher audio bandwidth) at 8-12kb/s.

Tesla Pro Audio and Tesla Pro Speech may be used individually or as an integrated codec, operating in the range of 4-96kb/s. In addition, ATC Labs is currently prototyping a low-delay (<50msec), low-complexity audio codec for two-way high-fidelity audio communication. This will be offered as a new product, Tesla Pro LD, by mid-2005.

The company, headquartered in Chatham, NJ, will license the codecs in a variety of implementations, and will provide consultation sales support and systems integration services in conjunction with product licensing.

For more information on ATC Labs, please contact info@atc-labs.com, or visit http://www.atc-labs.com.