SoC designs: Driver for the next wave of consumer electronics

The race is on to meet the demands of the consumer electronics market.

Global competition in consumer markets has placed increasing pressure on product designers to achieve exceptional high performance while continuing to shrink the devices as well as lowering overall system cost.

In addition, more and more consumer electronics are required to operate as low-powered portable devices, run with batteries or even solar energy, challenging IC designers to reduce power consumption.

Until recently, designers had to choose between memory density, sustained random access speeds, and power supply demanded by new applications. The designer would be forced to choose whether to have speed, density or low power, with the result that whichever is chosen will be at the expense of reducing the performance on the other two.

To support today’s fast paced markets with the features in demand, System-on-Chip (SoC) designs seek to optimize all three parameters simultaneously.

Innovation via integration is fostering the growth of consumer electronics. Companies like SigmaTel is supplying highly programmable SoCs that lower power consumption and cost. Because of this, the company enables the creation of portable audio devices with more available features at a lower price point to the consumer.

SigmaTel D-Major audio decoder solutions provide high quality audio playback for portable devices such as MP3 Flash and harddrive audio players. These solutions integrate a microcontroller, USB interface, DC/DC converter, ADC, and DAC functionality into one chip.

With 50 hours of life on a single AA battery and small form factor designs as small as 14.5 square cm, D-Major is a true single-chip solution that maintains a flexible interface with the latest software upgrades and algorithms that the consumer elects to suit their usage model.

The SigmaTel audio decoder can be the host chip or interface to a host processor chip, and nearly all of its digital pins can be configured for general purpose I/O, which offers great flexibility in customizing audio-enabled devices.

Product designers cannot confine themselves to just simplifying the hardware development. They must also take into account software development by providing for a hardware/ software co-design methodology.

SigmaTel is also among the new breed of SoC suppliers that not only provide the hardware, but also customizable software for its integrated circuits. By offering a complete hardware and software processor solution, the company helps product designers release more functionality from devices in time to meet today’s demanding market windows.

Today’s product designers are challenged to meet a rapid expansion of customer expectations. With an increasing number of consumer electronics applications and with form factors of some devices reaching incredibly small levels, extreme SoC integration provides the opportunity to keep up with hot trends of the day.

With most functionality built onto one chip, product designers can support multiple formats, lower power consumption, and decrease development time. Also, SoCs make it easy for designers to upgrade features in a consumerfavorite gadget and quickly launch a more advanced model … just in time for the holiday season.