For those of you who do not know ESS stands for Electronic Speech Systems. I wanted to make that certain specification before I went on and talked about the domain of the company, its area of interest and their accomplishments.
ESS Technology Incorporated, the public name of the company, is a manufacturer of computer multimedia products and it has its main office in Fremont, California. The company it is functioning since 1984 and the co-founders are Fred Chan, a VLSI designer and software engineer and Forrest Mozer, a space physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. The company has over 500 employees all over the world and Robert Blair is the CEO and President.
Nowadays ESS it is known for their line of portable multimedia players, but back then, in the beginning, it was popular for their line Audiodrive, a line of chips for audio cards.
ESS used to produce synthetic speech for home computers systems (as Commodore 64), realistic sounding voices that became very popular in time. One of them is “He slimed me!” from Ghostbusters and another one is “Another visitor – Stay a while, stay forever!” from Impossible Mission.
In the mid 1990s developed the Audiodrive line, a line that was based on manufacturing pc audio and video chips, which were being used in all sorts of gadgets. And the development continued until today. ESS Technology Inc. it is known for designing and manufacturing high-performance audio and video chips and semiconductor devices for different market domains: home, consumer and automotive.
The products that this company has to offer are the following:
- DVD solutions: DVD processor, transmitter, decoder, everything that can ease up the work with the DVDs.
- TV and radio solutions: TV tuners and radio tuners; they support digital TV standards as well as standard TV standards: ATSC, DVB-T, DVB-C, NTSC, PAL, SECAM and FM radio formats.
- Digital media player solutions: chips that allow playback of MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG-4, photos and music formats on different phones, media players and such.
- Internet solutions: chips that allow high integration and low cost for WAN/LAN connection, phone, fax etc.
The company is among the first ones one the market in this particular domain. That is because through the time it maintained a well-based relationship with its clients and manufacturers, its goal has always been providing the best service and the defect products rate has always been one of the lowest.
