Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI), today announced the launch
of a low-cost CD chip, the SAA7752, for a wide range of applications including
today's increasingly popular Internet audio equipment such as MP3 CD players.
The SAA7752 comprises a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) with ICs, a software stack
and a reference design which provide the features required by the market,
enabling manufacturers to cut development time and costs. The chip will drive
down costs for the mass market and, accordingly is expected to increase market
acceptance of MP3 CD players.
"MP3 has captured the imagination of consumers. The key to what consumers
want is flexibility, and MP3 offers exactly that: the ability to download music
from the internet, burn it to a CD and play it back in the living room, while on
the move or in the car. The CD offers tremendous storage capacity that has never
been available before for audio content," said Paul O'Donovan, Senior Analyst
with Gartner Dataquest. "We expect MP3 playback on CD equipment to become the
norm within two years. This is a significant opportunity for semiconductor
manufacturers operating in the audio CD market."
"We developed the SAA7752 with our mass market customers in mind. We created
a reference design and software stack to shorten development time, reduce
production risk and enable a quick time to market for our customers," said Hans
Fleurkens, product marketing manager, BL Audio Solutions for Audio DSP products
at Philips Semiconductors. "This fits with our objective to make audio portable
for the end user and will further the demand for MP3 CD players by meeting
high-volume consumer price points."
A single read/write CD can contain over ten hours of music in MP3 format.
Consumers using a computer to legally download MP3 files from the Internet or to
save their own music collection in a different format, condensing their entire
audio catalog onto a handful of CDs using the MP3 format.
The SAA7752 offers advanced digital signal processing, enhanced functionality
and interfacing on a single chip, targeted for MP3CD solutions, and is the ideal
companion to CD Servo ICs. A solution based on the SAA7752 requires only a small
number of external components, allows for slim-line designs and lowers the
overall system costs. Reference designs and ready to use software stacks
minimize development costs for Philips' customer base. The SAA7752 is one of the
products in the SAA775x DSP family of audio ICs. All the SAA775x ICs have a
programmable architecture enabling support for all popular audio decompression
algorithms such as MP3, AAC and WMA.
Source: Philips.com
