 Hi, IonMPI. OK, IonMPI, it's brought to you by DigiKey, this week's new product from Analog Devices. Lady Aida is? This week, it's the Max 98365, which, as you can imagine, was born initially at Maxim. Analog Devices purchased Maxim, so now it's an AD device. But Maxim is near and dear to my heart. So I think they get a little bit of credit for the original engineering and design work. So this is a I2S slash TDM slash left justified mono class D amplifier chip. It's what it looks like on the rendering. It's a BGA 12-pin chip, which we'll talk about in a moment. And it is a teeny cost-effective 14-volt plug and play digital class D amplifier. It's got a lot of specs, but the things I thought were most interesting is, one, you can power it from 3 to 14 volts. So you can run it from lipo batteries, double A's, up to 12-volt batteries. It does very good at powering both 4 ohm and 8 ohm and 16 ohm loads, up to 18 watts on the high end of 12, 14 volts. If you want low THD, of course, you'll go down a little bit more. But you easily tend to 18 watts into 4 ohms. It's class D, so it's very efficient. The efficiency is very good into 8 ohms. It's very tiny. It's very powerful. It's 5-volt logic compatible. And you can use it with a variety of different digital audio interfaces. So this is kind of like the typical application. It's got this kind of funky thing going on there where there is, normally, you'd have frame clock and data out. That's like your standard I2S or TDM multiplexed data. And by connecting to the three data pins, there's like DA0, DIA0, DIA1, DIA2. And by changing the connection, it will auto-detect whether it should be in left or right mode, which I think is kind of neat. That also means, of course, it can auto-detect the bit rate. And as we mentioned in a moment, we don't need a master clock. But really, there's not a lot of things going on here. This is a very simple design. And it's tiny and does the job. It actually reminded me a lot of the Max 98357, which is a similar part number. And this is one of my favorite I2S amps. It just works like the Max 98365. It's a single-clusty audio amp. You just have a couple of passes on the output, but it does a great job with I2S in. And I use this with Raspberry Pis and microcontrollers just fine. So the only thing about that amp, this one, is it only goes up to 5 volts power. It only does, I think, like 3 watts or so. Whereas, like I said, this new amp can do up to 18 watts. Only thing is, this is a cool. This is not the chip itself. It's a different chip, but this is an SEM photo of a WLP. It's a WLP. So it's 12 pins, 4 by 3, and it is 0.4 millimeter pitch BGA, which is a bit tough. But that said, the inner pins, you can usually keep disconnected. You can use the outer pins, so at least you don't have to do blind vias or plug vias. You can pretty much, I will show in a little bit, you can kind of get away with just cutting your pins to do most of the things you want. And a lot of PCBs houses these days can give you a pretty good clearance on your 0.4 millimeter BGA pitch devices. So I'm less scared, as I used to be, of 0.4 millimeter pitch BGA. In fact, the matter is a lot of the more advanced chips are coming in these chip scale packages. As I mentioned, this has great power output. At 12 or 14 volts, you can get into 4 ohm or 8 ohm. Up to 18 watts, 15, 18 watts, with very low total harmonic distortion, so it sounds really good. There is a gain selection pin. Because as you imagine, it doesn't have I squared C for control, like some nice I2S amplifiers use I squared C for volume control. This one does not. So instead, you use there's a pin which you can connect or disconnect if you want to change the gain. TDM, I think that the gain isn't adjustable only in I2S slash left justified. Again, this is one of the inner pins. So you might want to just leave it unconnected. So the gain is 18.5 volts. And then just adjust your input signal to make sure it doesn't overwhelm the speaker. And this is the package. It's super tiny, so you can see the pitch. And I think it's like 1 and 1 half by 1.75 millimeters. So it's like tiny. It's a tiny chip. This is some of the examples of wiring. So you can see the gain slot is the middle right pin. So you can either connect it to ground input or leave it floating without having to route through the GPIO pads. So basically, it means, look, there's two gain options that user resistor. That one's a little tough. But if you don't mind just bridging the BGA, you can get three different hard select gains. It's not like a thing that totally kills me. Would have been really cool if it was only outer pins. It would have been easier to route. But I think the fact of the matter is everyone wants air pod sized amplifiers these days has to be ultra tiny. So the interesting thing is this digital audio interface configuration. So basically, by switching around the pin connections, it does auto detect some settings. But whether it's like the left channel, the right channel, or stereo mix depends on how you connect the data clock, the left right clock, and the data itself, the data pin. The three pins for I2S, which way you can figure them tells you which channel it's on and whether it does left justified or I2S. So there's a big description of it. And there's a couple of example wiring diagrams. For example, here you can see, here's how you can wire it up. And it's like one of them would be your left channel, and one of them would be your right channel. I'm trying to think which one. It's like one of the pins is connected slightly differently. I think so. And it's connected the same. Oh, it's like DA1 and DA2 are swapped, and that's how it knows whether it's a left or right channel. So the previous break that I talked about, the Max 85, 375, or whatever, there's a pin you have to short to tell it whether it's left or right. In this case, you just change the pin wiring order. So just keep an eye on that. One thing I do like about this is like the Max 98, 357. Again, one of my favorite I2S amps is there's no M clock. That means you only need three GPIO to connect it to your I2S connection onto your mic controller. And most importantly, on single board Linux computers like the Raspberry Pi that does not expose the M clock pin, this will work. You can always generate an M clock with a separate oscillator, but why pay $0.50 and take it more board space when it'll auto generate the M clock signal on its own? Very handy. Part of the auto detection of what mode it's in, I2S or TDM, is that it will auto generate that M clock from the bit clock, but not all bit clocks are valid. Now, I looked at them, and all of them seemed reasonable, 8 kilohertz, 44.1, 88.2, et cetera, 192 kilohertz. Just keep that in mind. You can't use 12 kilohertz. I don't think it likes that. So it's expecting standard I2S connectivity or TDM connectivity. And finally, just as a note, I think that there's only one version in stock right now, but there are four versions, ABCD. And they basically depends on how long it takes to turn on and when data is valid. So it's like there's a little bit of a like, does it ramp up the volume? Or does it just turn on? Does it take time? 13 milliseconds or 1 millisecond? So look at this table. Again, I think only one of them is available right now. So if you need a custom on contact, ADI, and they will hook you up. Available on DigiKey. It's in stock. And we mean that. 915 at the time of this printing. Yes. By printing, I mean screenshotting. For reals. Yeah, so you can get them. You actually can get them. And I can show quickly the valve board. I did pick one up, because I want to actually was also like maybe I'll make a breakout out of this board. So that's the amplifier. So it's quite tiny. And this is a very nice teal. It says maximum integrated. But again, it's ADI now. But that's the chip. You can see the total size of the amplifier. These are all the headers and connectors. But the amplifier itself is maybe three millimeters by three millimeters, including all the passives you need. OK. And that is this week's Ion API. Ion API.