Jerry McGuire
A Dynamic Power Play
June 2008
The Personal Media Player is continuing to evolve. With its roots in the humble MP3 player that was considered revolutionary a few short years ago, feature sets are constantly being updated, and lines are continuing to be blurred between existing devices, such as telephones, navigation systems, media players, and computers, cameras and game consoles. Digital television, and wireless communication of all types from personal area and local area networks to satellite reception, to gestural user interfaces, are competing to be the ‘next big thing’ in the ultimate consumer handheld device. All of these developments point to even higher levels of processing performance, larger storage capacity, and greater power demand in a nearly fixed size device.
Many manufacturers are finding that the best design approach in such a dynamic market is to keep as much functionality as possible in software that targets a platform that hits the market requirements in terms of performance, price, size, and battery life. This approach reduces time to market and technical risk, while providing features that lead the competitive offerings. The avoidance, wherever possible, of fixed function hardware that can quickly become obsolete or irrelevant, and the use of a performance-scalable processor, provides a multi-product, multi-regional platform that reduces development time and risk as product cycles shrink and new features, media formats, and digital rights management schemes emerge.
The Blackfin product roadmap also provides a path for continuous improvement in these dimensions over time. Developers can start with one Blackfin part and move to others in the family as performance needs change or improvements in power management technology become available. We expect to see many power sensitive designs to incorporate the Blackfin BF52x parts due to their leadership in power efficiency and advanced power management. These are essential to building more functionality into battery-powered devices, such as personal media players.
Innovators in the consumer electronics field will undoubtedly continue to find that the Blackfin ‘sweet spot’ of power, performance, peripherals, price and partners is the place to look for solutions to address these opportunities. We can’t wait to see what happens next. It’s a good bet that a Blackfin will be at the center of it.
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