| Type | Public NASDAQ: ESST |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1984 |
| Headquarters | Fremont, California |
| Key people |
Fred Chan, Forrest Mozer: Founders |
| Products | Speech, Multimedia, IT, MP3 players |
| Revenue | US$257.3 million (2004) |
| Net income | US$(82) million (Q2 FY 2007) |
| Website | www.esstech.com |
ESS Technology Incorporated NASDAQ: ESST) is a listed manufacturer of computer multimedia products based in Fremont, California. It was founded by Fred Chan and Forrest Mozer in 1984. The firm employs more than 500 people worldwide. Robert L. Blair is the CEO and President of the company.
Historically, ESS Technology was most famous for their line of their Audiodrive chips for audio cards. Now they are known for their line of portable multimedia players.
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ESS Technologies was founded in 1984 as Electronic Speech Systems, by Professor Forrest Mozer, a space physicist at the University of California, Berkeley and Fred Chan, a VLSI designer and software engineer,[1] in Berkeley, California.
The company was created at least partially as a way to market Mozer's speech synthesis system (described in US patents 4,214,125, 4,433,434 and 4,435,831) after his (3 year, summer 1978 to summer 1981, extended) contract with National Semiconductor expired in 1983 or so.
Electronic Speech Systems produced synthetic speech for, among other things, home computer systems like the Commodore 64. Within the hardware limitations of that time, ESS used Mozer's technology, in software, to produce realistic sounding voices that often became the boilerplate for the respective games. Two popular sound bytes from the Commodore 64 were "He slimed me!!" from Ghostbusters and Elvin Atombender's "Another visitor - Stay a while, stay forever!" in the original Impossible Mission.
At some point, the company moved from Berkeley to Fremont, California. Around this time, the company was renamed to ESS Technology.
Later, in 1994, Forrest Mozer's son Todd Mozer, an ESS employee, branched off and started his own company called Sensory Circuits Inc, later Sensory Inc. to market this same speech software and other speech technology.[2]
In the mid 1990s, ESS started working on making pc audio, and later, video chips, and created the popular Audiodrive line, used in hundreds of different products.
ESS is unrelated to the Ensoniq Sound System, another popular sound card often abbreviated as 'ESS'.
Forrest Mozer continues his research work at the University of California, these days as Associate Director of Space Sciences. He was awarded EGU Hannes Alfven Medallist 2004 for his work in electrical field measurement and space plasma and also was involved in building the microphone to record sounds from the Mars Lander. He is a member of the board of directors of Sensory, Inc.
Fred Chan held a number of positions at ESS, and was CEO of Vialta, an internet offshoot of ESS, until his stepping down on July 18, 2007, to pursue philanthropic interests.[1]
ESS Techonology Inc. exists to this day, located in Fremont, California.
Many products are quoted from Steve Foskett's site.[3] Others are referred to on an SEC form filed by ESS.[4]
ESS1868 AudioDrive [5]
Professor Mozer first became interested in speech technology when a blind student in his class in 1970 asked whether he could help design a talking calculator.[6] Mozer spent 5 years working on it, and his speech technology first appeared in the Telesensory Systems "Speech+" talking calculator, in a chip called the "CRC Chip", more commonly known as s14001a, the first self-contained speech synthesizer chip. This chip was also used in a few arcade games, notably Atari's Wolf Pack, and Stern Electronics' Berzerk and Frenzy, and in several of Stern's pinball machines.
After a three-year exclusive deal with Telesensory Systems from 1975 to 1978, Forrest Mozer sold a 3 year license to National Semiconductor, and they created another chip using Mozer synthesis, the MM54101 "Digitalker". At first, even then, all words were encoded by hand by Mozer in his basement, but in the third or fourth year of the license, National came up with a software encoder for it. After the exclusive license expired (National seemed to have a "non-exclusive" license for a year or so), Mozer licensed the technology to ESS. After Mozer's son Todd split off and created Sensory Circuits Inc., the technology was licensed there.
According to the Sensory Inc. history pages and old datasheets, they offered three types of compression:
and a few other PCM/LPC based systems.
Later, Sensory bought up the remains of many old speech synthesis manufacturers from the 1980s, such as Texas Instruments' speech division.
Professor Mozer's technique not only produced very realistic sounding speech, it also required very little on-chip (later, in software) RAM, a sparse and expensive commodity at that time. The advanced compression algorhithm (patented, an early form of psychoacoustic compression using similar spectra of ADPCM-encoded waves) reduced the memory footprint of speech about a hundredfold, so one second of speech would require 90 to 625 bytes. With ESS-speech, samples that would normally require almost all of the 64 kilobyte memory of the Commodore 64 (if encoded in PCM) were so small, that the entire game fit into the RAM along with speech, without requiring additional loads from disk.