Here's a curious trend: The latest technologies in portable audio devices have more to do with video than audio. Seeing limited op-portunities for further differentiation on the audio front, designers are looking to add either video capabilities or the ability to display still images to audio players.
But the inclusion of a color display presents some new challenges. Whereas designers spent years trying to get these devices down to very small form factors, they now need to make the platforms large enough to accommodate an easily visible video screen. Second, they must provide enough storage to hold image and video files-and the latter, in particular, can be quite large. Third, they need to provide enough battery power to drive the system, assuming that it will now include a hard drive to store the large video and image files.
"We're seeing color screens becoming standard in this market," observed Kevin
Hawkins, a marketing manager for portable audio and infotainment at Texas Instruments Inc. "But there's still a question as to how consumers are going to adopt and use this video, and where they're going to get the content from. Yet, even though there's concern whether these are viable products, that hasn't really deterred OEMs from building them."
For the time being, thin-film-transistor displays are the screens of choice. They are reasonably well-priced, and there are many suppliers. The displays themselves typically have a polarizing or contrast-enhancement film, or an anti-reflection coating to make them more viewable.
"There is a lot of science and economies associated with how to do those [films] well," says Hubert Kostal, vice president of marketing at NanoOpto Corp. (Somerset, N.J.). "This is especially true as the screens become more sophisticated, have more pixels and so on." NanoOpto is working on some of those coating technologies, which Kostal believes will become more prevalent as the video-player trend progresses.
"I think you'll see a lot more video in the future," said Mike Haidar, general manager of software and systems technology at Analog Devices Inc. "Much like the trend with still-image cameras, where they added Motion JPEG, I could see [developers] adding image capture to the audio players, as well as video. The processing power is becoming available in CPUs like Blackfin."
ADI's latest Blackfin processor has an on-board regulator to clock it down to handle audio. The same device can be run without any hardware changes all the way up to 600 MHz to perform full-motion video. Making the right architectural decisions can permit 10 to 12 hours of audio run-time, yet the same hardware can run long enough to view a couple of movies, the company asserts.
