Royal Philips Electronics today announced a low-power solution for hard disk drive (HDD) based portable audio players.

The PNX0106 is the latest addition to Philips' Nexperia Personal family of ICs for portable audio and multimedia players, and brings the high audio quality of Philips' IC solutions for flash MP3 players to the HDD market.

The market for HDD-based portable audio players is forecasted to grow from 13.9 million units produced in 2004 to 54.7 million units produced in 2008 according to Gartner. According to Philips, the PNX0106 further helps manufacturers to compete in the market by offering a low-power solution for optimal battery life with the flexibility to support differentiating features. Additional features that can be supported by the PNX0106 include advanced user interfaces, interconnectivity and multimedia functions such as playback of images and simple video clips.

The PNX0106 combines a host of features for building high-performance, low-power portable audio devices with image playback. These features include a powerful 32-bit ARM926EJ-S processor, dedicated DSP for audio processing, IDE interface and USB connectivity (high-speed On-the-Go). To enable low-power devices, Philips has optimized software and applied advanced clocking techniques and internal block management to the PNX0106 to significantly reduce power consumption. The device also supports low-power SDRAMs.

For audio applications, the PNX0106 features a programmable architecture that provides support for multiple audio decompression algorithms including MP3, AAC and Microsoft WMA (licensing required), as well as MP3 compression with LifeVibes(TM) Music audio enhancement algorithms.

Availability and pricing
Philips' PNX0106 will begin sampling in July 2005 with mass production to begin in October 2005. It will be available for USD $12 in quantities of 10,000.