Reference Design for Integrated Media Player Development

(Business News & Technology News, 12 Jul 2005)

Portable Media Centers are Windows Mobile™-based handheld devices allowing users to download stored media from their PC for recorded Cinema-quality video movies, home videos, TV, music and photos “on the go.” To help speed the development of these portable media devices, Freescale Semiconductor has introduced its i.MX21 Portable Media Player (PMP) Reference Design. Based on the commercially available i.MX21 applications processor, the i.MX21 PMP reference design is said to eliminate months of development time in creating multimedia handhelds. The PMP reference design supports the Microsoft Windows® CE 5.0 OS — providing rich video and hi-fidelity audio in a cost-effective design package. Freescale’s i.MX21 PMP kit contains hardware and software complete with schematic (OrCAD or PDF), layout files, a bill of material, the i.MX21 Windows CE 5.0/Portable Media Center board support package and performance data. The i.MX21 multimedia processor is the latest addition to the Freescale i.MX family. The i.MX21 is a robust platform for delivering exceptional multimedia performance and long battery life. It includes an on-chip Enhanced Multimedia Accelerator (eMMA) offering independent pre- and post-processing modules as well as simultaneous MPEG-4 and H.263 encode and decode acceleration. This significantly reduces the memory, CPU cycles and power requirements to drive video. The commercially available i.MX21 applications processor has a suggested price of $16.80 in 10,000 piece quantities.