Freescale Semiconductor and Carle jointly opened the prelude of industrial techno

This year, in the major electronic products exhibition, you can see a new fashion digital products, portable multimedia player (PMP) figure. It is when we see the children's book size, three or four cm thick, color screen, can play movies and music of MP3, you can view photos or read books, but also when the U disk storage all kinds of information, some of the PMP but also the integration of the digital camera, camera and video recorder function. Due to the inherent advantages of PMP, so its development by the market.

PMP is on the edge of explosive growth

Compared with the traditional CD, VCD, DVD and the popular MP3 digital player in recent years, PMP has many inherent advantages in function and cost, so its development is optimistic about the market.

Now, the demand for PMP began to rise, some domestic companies are doing PMP processing exports to meet the needs of foreign markets." Techno - fly Carle PMP project technology alliance executive director, Shenzhen University professor Zhu Mingcheng said.

The industry generally believe that PMP will become a hot consumer electronics market in 2005. "The PMP market is on the edge of explosive growth both in China and around the world." Bill Speras, director of marketing at Ingenient, says.

Although this new digital products has many highlights, but because the current PMP products on the market only by a few brand monopoly, such as ARCHOS in Europe and SONY in Japan, China is still not really so, manufacturers began involvement, the market formed a monopoly price higher, the price is generally around 5000 yuan, which hindered the the application and popularization of PMP in China market.

Low cost and high performance PMP to enter the market

In the United States Semiconductor fly think of Carle's support, through the design and development of more than a year, Shenzhen private technology company techno technology company in early April finally successfully launched a new generation of high performance embedded hard disk multimedia player (PMP) products. This product has more features than most PMP on the market, for example, it is not only a handheld theater, can store and play dozens of films, but also a MP3 player that can store and display thousands of music, or DV digital camera and a 1 million 300 thousand pixel camera, at the same time, it is also a a USB digital companion and mobile hard disk, a TV program can record 50 hours of video recorder, an electronic book. "This product has the characteristics of high performance, multi-function, low cost, long working hours and so on." Professor Zhu Mingcheng said. The core of this PMP product is Freescale Carle i.MX multimedia processor. According to the Freescale Carle semiconductor Asia Pacific strategy and technical director Mr. Huang Zhihong, this is the first PMP product fly Si Carle i.MX multimedia processor in the global scope of the design, it will face the domestic and foreign market promotion.

Compared with similar products in the market, techno PMP products for the optimization of performance and cost in the design.

First of all, in terms of performance, its core using Freescale Carle i.MX multimedia processor, because i.MX series multimedia processor is designed for intelligent mobile phone, PMP and other handheld multimedia product development, therefore, it solves the chip products issued to the challenge of high performance in low power state. "We i.MX multimedia processor with hardware accelerator technology, the realization of MPEG4, MP3 hardware codec, so only need to provide audio and video frequency processing ability of high quality in 200MIPS i.MX can, such as i.MX processing capacity of 30 frames per second can provide the image, and at the same time, its power consumption is very low."

Fly think of Carle wireless and mobile phone multimedia mobile phone operating system group manager Mr. Liang Yaoguang said, "at present, the market is a DSP based PMP solution, because it is on the MPEG4 and MP3 codec software, which requires DSP computing ability. For example, to achieve the techno functional requirements of PMP and DSP the frequency of 500MIPS, at least in the 400MIPS, so the high frequency of the DSP, its power consumption is very large."

Professor Zhu Mingcheng also said that because the power consumption of the PMP hard disk and LCD accounts for PMP of the overall power consumption of 70% to 80%, therefore, they also adopted in the system design, power management technology unique, hard disk and LCD by reducing work time, effectively reduces the power consumption of PMP, prolong its working time. We launched the PMP continuous working time is currently the highest in the market, reaching 4.5 hours, while many other PMP products on the market, continuous working time of about 2 hours to 3 hours."

Secondly, the design of the product cost optimization. Although not yet set the price of the product, but Professor Zhu Mingcheng said that at the beginning of the design, they take into account the Chinese people's psychological threshold for the price of PMP products, the cost of optimization. "Compared to other PMP products on the market, the price is certainly techno PMP pull down more, we product is to break the monopoly price, therefore, in addition to fly think of Carle to our support, we also teamed up with a number of local enterprises, this is an important step to cost optimization."

Professor Zhu Mingcheng said that in the future, their PMP products to the development of two practical functions, one can receive TV programs; the two is the function of wireless LAN access. In order to support the future development of PMP products, i.MX multimedia processor also has a good follow-up development plan. According to Mr. Liang Yaoguang introduced, at present, techno PMP is designed based on i.MX21 and i.MX21 using 130nm technology. While being