Thursday, American chipmaker Texas Instruments unveiled a new 2.4GHz wireless audio streaming chip and wireless headset development kit designed for portable audio players and audiophile-level consumer audio solutions. Texas Instruments says the headphone reference design is capable of 22 hours of usage (double the current average battery life) with an electronic material cost of only $5.

At just about one year old, Texas Instruments' PurePath Wireless audio family is a low-power Radio Frequency protocol in the unlicensed 2.4GHz ISM band like Bluetooth, WLAN, Zigbee, ANT, and RF4CE.

Similar to the way Zigbee has been billed as the low-power wireless networking protocol for home automation, TI designed PurePath to be strictly used for audio data. As such, it offers functionality not commonly found in audio devices with Bluetooth. For example, the new SoC debuted today (CC8530) is capable of streaming two uncompressed stereo streams (16-bit, 44.1-KHz or 48-KHz) from a single source simultaneously to four different receivers.

Though interference in the 2.4GHz band is often problematic, TI says PurePath offers "excellent coexistence" with Bluetooth and WLAN, and that it has a high mean time between dropout when compared to other wireless audio streaming solutions.

For equipment designers or independent developers, TI released a headset development kit and reference design today that utilize the PurePath standard and nearly 100% TI-made components.

"We've done all back-end work with the new wireless headset reference design, so engineers can build a prototype in less than one day," said Erling Simensen, product marketing manager, wireless audio at TI.

Texas Instruments claims this design is both cheap and energy efficient. At high volume production, the electronic bill of materials is only $5, and when equipped with a 3.7V, 465mAh battery, TI says the reference design is capable of 22 hours of use, which is double the current industry standard.

The PurePath Wireless Headset Development Kit is available immediately at a promotional price of $99 until the end of June. Following the initial availability, it will go up in price to $149.