Case Study: Philips achieves rapid algorithm validation and an award-winning Ambisound one-piece surround sound system with MathWorks

Philips Consumer Lifestyle (Philips) Develops One-Piece Surround Sound System

Philips Consumer Lifestyle’s iLab set out to create the Ambisound Soundbar, a one-piece surround-sound home theater system, but faced slow, hardware-centric development: engineers previously relied on analog designs or hand-coded DSP in Assembler/C, making it hard to try ideas, tune acoustics, and validate concepts without costly prototypes. To accelerate exploration and meet hardware constraints while letting non-programmers audition changes in real time, Philips turned to MathWorks tools such as Simulink, MATLAB, Signal Processing Toolbox, Simulink Coder, and MATLAB Compiler.

Using MathWorks, the team modeled and simulated algorithms, applied IIR and shelving filters, built a GUI for parameter tuning, generated C code for DSP implementation, and delivered standalone demos to other teams for real-time evaluation. MathWorks-enabled workflows cut algorithm validation from weeks to days, produced executable demonstrations in one day, allowed about 80% of the Simulink design to be reused for future projects, and helped Philips ship the award-winning, commercially successful Ambisound Soundbar.

Philips

Jan Tielen

DSP Engineer