[sdiy] Anadigm again

[Speth, John]

The recent talk about Anadigm got me to uncover a forgotten Anadigm evaluation kit we have here at work.  It has the AN220E04 on it.  The full blown dev tool comes for free for 60 days.  Within minutes I was getting useful results.  Of course, the downside is the switched cap design.

Eventually I started thinking about implementing a VCO or VCF.  I got the impression that any circuit realization you get is static (that is, not voltage controllable) for analog synth purposes.  There *is* a multiplier block but I think it's just a block implemented with an 8 bit lookup table and probably not suitable for applications requiring fine control via some control parameter.

At NAMM, Anadigm showed an analog synth using Anadigm parts.  The press release says that their oscillators are controllable over a 7 octave range (good but how accurate? didn't say).  They also say it's controllable using software LFOs and ADSRs.  What they didn't say is if it's controllable using external voltages.  We all know how accurate we need VCO control voltages.  I wonder if the Anadigm chips aren't capable of this kind of accurate control.

Read all about the synth at http://www.anadigm.com/prs_05_a.asp?prid=34.  You can get the dev tool for free from Anadigm.  If you have the eval board, you can test your results.  Designing is not restricted if you don't have the board.

Does anyone know how the Anadigm synth was implemented?  How good is it for performance purposes (is the synth a toy or is it better)?

John Speth