• Stephan Gerhold's avatar
    ASoC: codecs: Add driver for NXP/Goodix TFA989x (TFA1) amplifiers · af00978a
    Stephan Gerhold authored
    NXP's TFA98xx (now part of Goodix) are fairly popular speaker amplifiers
    used in many smartphones and tablets. Most of them are sold as "smart
    amplifiers" with built-in "CoolFlux DSP" that is used for volume control,
    plus a "sophisticated speaker-boost and protection algorithm".
    
    Unfortunately, they are also almost entirely undocumented. The short
    datasheets (e.g. [1] for TFA9897) describe the available features,
    but do not provide any information about the registers or how to use
    the "CoolFlux DSP".
    
    The amplifiers are most often configured through proprietary userspace
    libraries. There are also some (rather complex) kernel drivers (e.g. [2])
    but even those rely on obscure firmware blobs for configuration (so-called
    "containers"). They seem to contain different "profiles" with tuned speaker
    settings, sample rates and volume steps (which would be better exposed
    as separate ALSA mixers).
    
    The format of the firmware files seems to have changed a lot over the time,
    so it's not even possible to simply re-use the firmware originally provided
    by the vendor.
    
    Overall, it seems close to impossible to develop a proper mainline driver
    for these amplifiers that could make proper use of the built-in DSP.
    
    This commit implements a compromise: At least the TFA1 family of the
    TFA98xx amplifiers (usually called TFA989x) provide a way to *bypass*
    the DSP using a special register sequence. The register sequence can be
    found in similar variations in the kernel drivers from lots of vendors
    e.g. in [3] and was probably mainly used for factory testing.
    
    With the DSP bypassed, the amplifier acts mostly like a dumb standard
    speaker amplifier, without (hardware) volume control. However, the setup
    is much simpler and it works without any obscure firmware.
    
    This driver implements the DSP bypass combined with chip-specific
    initialization sequences adapted from [2]. Only TFA9895 is supported in
    this initial commit. Except for the lack of volume control I can not hear
    any difference with or without the DSP, it works just fine.
    
    This driver allows the speaker to work on mainline Linux running on the
    Samsung Galaxy A3/A5 (2015) [TFA9895] and Alcatel Idol 3 [TFA9897].
    TFA9897 support will be added in separate patch set later.
    
    [1]: https://product.goodix.com/en/docview/TFA9897%20SDS_Rev.3.1?objectId=47&objectType=document&version=78
    [2]: https://source.codeaurora.org/external/mas/tfa98xx
    [3]: https://github.com/sonyxperiadev/kernel/blob/57b5050e340f40a88e1ddb8d16fd9adb44418923/sound/soc/codecs/tfa98xx.c#L1422-L1462Signed-off-by: default avatarStephan Gerhold <stephan@gerhold.net>
    Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210513104129.36583-2-stephan@gerhold.netSigned-off-by: default avatarMark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>
    af00978a
tfa989x.c 8.87 KB