IVL Technologies (Handheld Karaoke Player)

"With consumer electronics products like the On-Key Karaoke Handheld Player, we needed software that was reliable, compact and deterministic. When processing audio and video, we require the OS to have a low and consistent latency for interrupts and task switching. The Nucleus PLUS kernel met those requirements." --Mike Ray, engineering manager, IVL Technologies Ltd.

IVL Technologies' On-Key Karaoke Handheld Player Sings along with the Nucleus PLUS Kernel

Founded in 1983, IVL Technologies delivers karaoke and singing solutions to the consumer electronics, professional music and commercial karaoke market. Today IVL is a world leader in providing consumers with the best karaoke experience. IVL helps people sing better, sound better and have fun by providing quality karaoke products and digital song content through the onkeysongs.com online community. The company's patented On-Key™ technology has made them recognized leaders in digital voice processing.

The On-Key Karaoke Handheld Player

The On-Key Karaoke Handheld Player is a karaoke microphone that plugs into a TV and allows a person to sing to many of their favorite songs. The Karaoke microphone contains many innovative features such as tempo control, pitch correction, harmony, key control of the music played and transformation of the voice to the opposite gender. The Karaoke Player comes with 50 songs built in to the microphone. By connecting to the Internet, a person can download additional songs so there is never a chance of running out of tunes to sing.

Nucleus selected for the On-Key Karaoke Handheld Player

IVL Technologies purchased a development package based on the Nucleus RTOS from an image and audio processor technology company, Sound Vision Inc., which includes an ARM7 TDMI-based chip called Clarity 4. Sound Vision provided IVL with a reference design that was modified by IVL to create a Karaoke microphone that plays songs stored in MIDI format. Included in that development package was the Nucleus PLUS real-time kernel.

The Nucleus PLUS kernel is reliable and scalable; developers can scale the kernel down to as small as 17KB, including both code and data sizes, for the ARM7 processor. This is important for feature intensive consumer electronics applications such as the On-Key Karaoke Handheld Player. Additionally, with Mentor Graphics' royalty-free business model, developers using the Nucleus kernel saved money by not passing on the cost of royalty fees to the consumer.

IVL Technologies corporate website