New Ready-to-Use Design Lowers Bill of Materials, While Supporting Robust Feature Sets
Texas Instruments (TI) announced the availability of the latest advancement in a series of portable entertainment reference designs. The new ready-to-use design provides a complete hardware and software solution with a low bill of materials (BOM), low power consumption and turnkey support for features that can help consumer electronics original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) differentiate their portable digital audio products in an intensely competitive market. Attendees of the Computex Show (June 1-5, 2004 in Taipei, Taiwan) can experience a live demo of this reference design at TI's booth (#T203). (See www.ti.com/portableaudio3 ).
Based on TI's Digital Audio family of digital signal processors (DSP), the production-ready system minimizes design complexity and manufacturing costs, enabling the quick development of competitively priced digital audio players. Products based on the design can operate for up to 45 hours on a single AA or up to 20 hours on a single AAA battery. The low-power, high performance DSP can handle all of the processing required for a portable audio player with overhead remaining to allow manufacturers to differentiate their products by adding additional features, such as TI's proprietary Time Scale Modification (TSM) software or 3rd Party post-processing algorithms.
The new reference design offers broad support for a variety of features and functionality, including:
- All major audio compression-decompression algorithms, including mp3, Windows Media Audio (WMA), Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), mp3Pro and voice recording, as well as a built-in FM receiver.
- High-quality timescale modification (TSM) algorithm, enabling the playback of recorded sound with normal pitch at up to twice the speed, or slowing playback down to half the speed.
- The commonly used MultiMedia Card (MMC) removable flash card, and can be modified to support other flash formats, as well as hard disk drives.
- USB 2.0 support, enabling easy connection to computers.
- A flexible DSP solution, allowing OEMs to add post-processing or converge other types of functionality, such as voice recording, into portable digital audio players.
- Extensive multi-language support, based on TI's industry-leading eXpressDSP's Software Technology, simplifying development while providing flexibility for system extension.
TI's portable audio player reference design and complete manufacturing kit are available today. Please contact your local TI sales representative for additional information. Manufacturers can also plan to design their next-generation hard disk drive-based portable audio players on a new feature-enhanced reference design from TI, which is expected to be available in the third quarter of this year.
