New Portable HD Tech Raises Hopes
Tuesday, September 28 @ 08:00:00 PDT
Oki has announced that they have developed a single-chip system for hard disk drive audio players, enabling the devices to get faster transfer speeds and longer battery life.
Oki announced that it has succeeded in developing two ARM946E-S(TM)-core system LSIs, the ML696500 series, using a single chip to realize the major component functions of hard disk drive (HDD) audio players. Oki begins sample shipment from November 2004, targeting the rapidly expanding HDD mounted mobile audio player market. Volume shipment starts from January 2005, aiming to achieve production of 500,000 units per month designated for the worldwide market in the fiscal year ending March 2006.
"Though HDD mounted portable audio players have been attracting attention recently, slow transfer speeds from PC to player and short battery life have been some issues," said Akira Kamo, President of Silicon Solutions Company at Oki Electric. "Oki's system LSIs enable greatly increased speed and performance, small size, and low power consumption, in order to meet the user needs. With the total solution Oki provides with its chip and software, HDD audio player manufactures can develop a compact and high performance player in a short timeframe."
The ML696500 series introduced is an LSI intended for HDD audio players. It enables MP3 and WMA audio files to be played, as well as high-speed data transfer between PC and the player's hard drive. It comes in two models; either with an onboard 512 KB Flash ROM; the ML69Q6500, or without; the ML696500. Since both models have onboard USB 2.0 high-speed device controllers and Ultra DMA 66-compatible ATA/IDE controllers, a dramatic increase in data transfer speed between PC and player has been realized; with a current effective data transfer rate of 128 Mbps, compared to that of 8 Mbps for USB 1.1 full-speed controllers.
Furthermore, the ML696500 series has simplified the design of complex analog circuitry by combining primary audio-player component functions onto a single chip. Previously, components such as the DA converter, mounted with a headphone amplifier, AD converter mounted with a microphone amplifier required several chips.
Concurrently with the introduction of the ML696500 series, Oki will begin selling SDKs (software development kits) for this LSI, for use in developing software for reproduction of music files, managing hard drive files, and other purposes. Oki will continue to develop small size, high performance and low power consumption system LSIs together with software and aims sales of 10 billion yen in the HDD audio player market by the fiscal year ending March 2007.
