This is pretty cool news; The Taiwanese company ICSI has made an USB flash disc that has an integrated MP3 decoder. The flash discs can be made very small and it's already possible to store to 1 GB of data on them
This technology makes very very small MP3 players possible. The device has also a low power usage, but till now only supports USB1.1 making transfers from your computer to the device very slow.
ICSI has added MP3 decoder and audio codec functionality to the chip, which also reads six types of storage interfaces '” Compact Flash card, smart-media card, multimedia card, secure digital card, memory stick card and IBM's micro drive. |
"Since the form factor is pretty small, it still just looks like a flash disk. If I didn't tell you it was an MP3 player, you would just treat it as a thumb drive," said William Fu, an associate vice president at ICSI
More information about this new development can be found here.
Source: EEtimes.com
