products

PortalPlayer's personal media player platforms have been used in some of the most innovative music jukeboxes, car stereos, standalone high-end audio systems and more. Using PortalPlayer's comprehensive platform solutions that include system-on-chip, firmware, software and third-party integration tools, computer and consumer electronics manufacturers have everything at their fingertips to develop leading mobile devices rapidly and affordably.

system-on-chip

PortalPlayer's platforms include targeted, high performance system-on-chip (SoC) technology designed for the personal media player market. Our SoCs are driven by multiple processing engines that allow complex multi- tasking such as real-time creation and playback of synchronized audio and photo slideshows. Our SoCs support most major peripheral connection protocols including USB, Firewire, infra-red, Bluetooth and Ethernet. This support enables connectivity to a variety of playback and display devices and content creation platforms including PCs, televisions, car and home audio systems and cameras. The performance of our SoCs allows data transfer rates at speeds of up to 480 megabits per second, allowing a user to download compressed music from a standard music CD to their personal media player in just a few seconds.

SoCs that integrate a central processing unit, memory interfaces and other components must address a range of requirements, including low power, high performance, low cost and high integration. We believe that optimally balancing these conflicting, but concurrent, requirements for the target device is the key to market leadership.

Our SoC platforms utilize dual 32-bit ARM7 microprocessor cores to provide scaleable performance. This enables support for audio encoders and digital rights management support, audio post-processing effects such as equalization, stereo expansion and networking connectivity enhancements. Our SoCs are designed to work with small form factor HDDs and flash memory. They also include on-chip memory, a liquid crystal display controller, HDD controllers, flash memory controllers, television output support controllers and analog components, including analog to digital converters and USB transceivers. Our SoCs are manufactured using standard complementary metal-oxide semiconductor, or CMOS, processes.

customizable firmware and software

Our firmware, which is sold as a bundled solution with our SoCs, includes a real-time operating system, intelligent library indexing with advanced database engines, an architecture that supports multiple digital rights management rules and an adaptive power management module. Benefits of our firmware include smooth media playback, the ability for users to easily and flexibly organize and find their media, support for different online music services and reduced power requirements and longer battery life.

Our software development kit includes a comprehensive suite of components, such as device link libraries and drivers, tools, sample code and documentation to create PC applications that allow personal media players to interact with PCs to increase their utility and enhance the user's experience.

firmware and fdk

Our firmware development kits, or FDKs, include the embedded firmware code, tools and documentation necessary to develop personal media player products. The principal capabilities of our FDK include:

• Enabling high-quality audio playback and encoding through optimized implementations of audio/photo media compression and decompression functions, or codecs;
• Supporting a range of file types, including music, photos, images and text through a strong file management system;
• Database engines that quickly sort and create indexes of thousands of audio and photo files;
• Supporting multiple music services with the appropriate decoders, decryption engines, application programming interfaces and hardware designs required to securely transfer, store and playback content to enable a customer to ship a product and then provide a firmware update to add a new music service or feature;
• Actively scaling the processor speed or powering on and off various parts of the SoC, hard disk drive or other components as required; and
• Advanced caching techniques to reduce the data movement required and the associated power drain.

software sdk

Our software development kit, or SDK, helps our customers build applications that enable users to easily manage the audio and photo files stored on their personal media player using feature-rich, PC user interfaces. Our SDK provides developers with the components, tools, sample code, and documentation to create a custom digital media management application for personal media players. The principal features of our SDK include:

• Enabling the development of third-party PC applications, which can provide device file system access and device control in Microsoft Windows operating systems;
• Enabling the transfer of content from the PC to the device;
• Synchronizing content to the portable device based on rules set up on the PC;
• Enabling firmware updates and device maintenance; and
• Supporting cryptography services to enable OEMs to customize their content security policies on the device.