Philips' PNX010x family brings advanced functionality to portable audio and video solutions for the Connected Consumer.

Leveraging its expertise in high performance digital audio solutions, Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) today announced its Nexperia Personal family of ICs for portable audio and multimedia players. The PNX010x family includes a host of key features that, when combined with Philips' software offering, enables consumer electronics manufacturers to quickly bring to market high performance portable flash and hard disk audio and multimedia players.

The market for portable audio and video players is quickly growing with CBIC forecasting growth of 75 percent on a yearly basis between 2002 and 2007 (Source: "Semiconductors: Digital Audio Comes of Age", April 2004). Meeting this market demand, Philips has developed ready-to-use IC solutions that offer manufacturers upgradeable software architectures, small form factors and low power solutions for a wide range of portable audio devices. This includes the PNX0101 and PNX0102 one-chip systems solutions targeted at portable audio players and the PNX0105 for multimedia players.

"With the PNX010x, the consumer now has the freedom to experience high quality audio entertainment on the move. These low power, highly integrated processors deliver Hi-fi quality sound in a tiny package," said Rutton Ruttonsha, vice president and general manager, personal entertainment solutions at Philips Semiconductors. "This is just the first step in our drive to make Audio/Video entertainment portable."

The integrated PNX0101 and PNX0102 combine an embedded 32-bit ARM7TDMI processor and a dedicated DSP for audio processing in a small footprint package to enable high performance portable audio applications. The PNX0105 incorporates the more powerful ARM926 core and an IDE interface to provide an excellent architecture for building portable multimedia players. The entire PNX010x family features a programmable architecture that provides support for multiple audio decompression algorithms including MP3, AAC and Microsoft WMA as well as MP3 compression with LifeVibes? Music audio enhancement algorithms.

Philips has designed the PNX010x family with extensive flexibility for customized functionality. This includes complete software stacks and optional development tools from Philips to help manufactures stay competitive with fast product design and differentiation.

Availability

Philips' PNX0101 and PNX0102 are currently in mass production. Mass production of the PNX0105 will begin in Q2 2005.