Rohm Semiconductor announced the development of USB host audio decoder ICs compatible to a variety of audio compression formats (BU9457KV: MP3, BU9458KV: MP3, WMA, AAC) and featuring high ESD resistance. The BU9457KV and BU9458KV are integrating an improved communication error recovery circuit in the USB interface block and provide high ESD resistance (6kV at USB terminal/15kV air/8kV contact discharge) – meeting the requirements of the Electrostatic Discharge Immunity Test IEC 61000-4-2 Level 4 Standard. As a result, terminal protection ICs are no longer required, contributing to simpler designs and greater compactness.

In addition, incorporating interface hardware such as USB host and SD memory controllers, along with a D/A converter, sampling rate converter, compressed audio file decoder, file system, and system controller in a VQFP64 package (12mm×12mm) makes it possible to play back music from USB memory and SD memory cards using a single chip. This facilitates compact application designs and allows simple command control (i.e. play, stop, fast forward, rewind) without the need for a microcontroller, enabling configuration of a USB host audio system by simply adding the chip to existing sets.