ESS Technology Incorporated is a private manufacturer of computer multimedia products, Audio DACs and ADCs based in Fremont, California with R&D centers in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada and Beijing, China.

Fred Chan VLSI designer and software engineer,[citation needed] in Berkeley, California, joined in 1985, and took over running the company in 1986 when Todd Mozer left for graduate school.

Within the hardware limitations of that time, ESS used Mozer's technology, in software, to produce realistic-sounding voices that often became the boilerplate for the respective games.

[2] In the mid-1990s, ESS started working on making PC audio, and later, video chips, and created the Audiodrive line, used in hundreds of different products.

He was awarded EGU Hannes Alfven Medallist 2004 for his work in electrical field measurement and space plasma and also was involved in building the microphone to record sounds from the Mars Lander.

Meanwhile Cirrus Logic dominates the portable device market,[5] Apple Inc is its number one customer accounting for approximately 83% of its chip sales.