Looking for the development history of chip storage

Perhaps the golden signboard of "Flying Core" machine is getting louder and louder, coupled with the gradual decline of MD machine in the competition and the vigorous development of MP3 market, people have turned their attention to the point of "high sound quality", and solution manufacturers are also vigorously developing and launching products with stronger performance at this time. Among them, SIGMATEL3520 and Philips PNX0 102 chips are the most prominent.

If Sigmatel 3420 is only an upgraded version of Sigmatel 34 10, then Sigmatel 3520 can be said to be a historic step in the development of Sigmatel family. Sigmatel 3520 not only inherits the MP3 hardware decoding of 3420, but also improves the shortcomings of Sigmatel 34101342, such as poor midrange performance and stiff treble, with clear sound quality and 95dB signal-to-noise ratio. Added MP3 hardware coding, FM radio and USB2. 0 and other functions; The processing speed of Sigmatel 3520 is also higher than the previous generation, reaching 75 MHz (65MHz for 34xx series). At that time, Meizu, a domestic MP3 manufacturer, introduced E2 with high cost performance, using Sigmatel3520 scheme, and finally became popular with its good sound quality performance, high practicability and cost performance.

At the same time, Philips has not slowed down, and introduced PNX series chips mainly used in digital TV, Hi-Fi audio and other professional fields into the world of portable walkman. PNX0 10x series decoding chips include PNX0 10 1, PNX0 102 and PNX0 105. PNX0 10 1 and PNX0 102 are mainly used for flash MP3 walkman, while PNX0 105 is aimed at multimedia players using micro hard disk as storage medium. PNX0 10 1 embeds 4Mbit programmable FLASH, and only supports USB 1. 1. So all USB2.0 interfaces equipped with PNX0 10 1 MP3 are realized by adding USB2.0 control chips. While PNX0 102 is embedded with 8mb programmable FLASH, which supports USB2.0. PNX0 105 also supports USB2.0, GDMA, IDE(ATA/ATAPI/PC card) and other interfaces, but there is no built-in programmable FLASH.

In terms of performance, PNX series all include a 24-bit EPICS7B audio DSP with a speed of 80- 100MIPS, and a 16-bit stereo audio ADC and DAC. PNX0 10 1 and PNX0 102 chips use 32-bit RISC processors, and the core is 60MHzARM7, which supports graphic browsing. PNX0 105 is a RISC processor with a core frequency of 140MHzARM9, which supports video playback.

Although PNX 01010102 chip has a good improvement in performance and function, the progress in sound quality is not obvious. Generally speaking, the sound quality of 0 10 102 chip is equivalent to that of SAA7750 chip, and some users even think that the sound quality of 010/02 chip is not as good as that of 7750 chip. In this way, compared with other chips that have made great progress in sound quality, the gap between "flying core" and other chips is greatly reduced.

During this period, Meizu completely saw the first step of the gradual growth of the MP3 market. Not only released a series of Sigmatel products such as ME and E2 in the low-end market, but also launched the "flying core" product E3 in the mid-end market to compete with imported products. This E3 with PNX0 102 chip cooperated with LifeVibes' top professional sound effects, and its sound performance was excellent at that time. In addition, the version of 16Mbit high-speed RAM and 8-layer PCB ensures the overall performance and quality of the machine. All this not only makes Meizu E3 an indispensable classic in the development of domestic machines, but also makes Meizu get unprecedented attention in domestic machines.

Onda VX909 uses a welding torch ATJ2085.

Just as the new solutions of Sigmatel and Philips are competing with each other in the MP3 global market, a powerful integrated circuit company in Zhuhai, China has gradually entered people's field of vision at this time. ATJ2085 chip encapsulated by LQFP64pin has high integration and few peripheral devices, which is very beneficial to production. Moreover, this chip supports USB2.0(FS) transmission, MP3/WMA/WAV/WMV/ASF media playback, MTV movie playback, and JPG, GIF and BMP image browsing. Although the sound quality is average and the FM effect needs to be improved, its approachable price is enough to make it very popular among some domestic MP3 manufacturers.

Although Torch Power is going to enter the high-end market from the low-end with ATJ2085, 2087 and 2089, it is not because of its products, but because of its lawsuit with Sigmatel. On March 6, 2005/KLOC-0, SigmaTel filed a lawsuit with the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) on Tuesday, local time, demanding that goods using Zhuhai Torch Power Products be prohibited from being exported to the United States. Two months ago, SigmaTel filed a lawsuit in a federal court in Texas, accusing Zhuhai Julius of infringing several power management patents used by the company for portable MP3 players. A month later, the ITC (United States Federal International Trade Commission) court ruled that Zhuhai Julius did not infringe SigmaTel's patent, and Zhuhai Julius filed a lawsuit with Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court, accusing Sigmatel's products, including STMP 3502, 3503, 3505, 3506, 35 10 and 3520, of infringing a patent of digital audio processing technology owned by the company. Zhuhai Juli hopes that the court will ban the design, production, sale and use of infringing integrated circuits and equipment containing SigmaTel infringing integrated circuits, thus ending SigmaTel's infringement in China. It was not until 2007 that this two-year-long war of mutual accusations and words ended in a dramatic ending after a long period of bargaining.

After a round of pure tone players, people have placed more expectations on MP3 players. As a result, we ushered in a color screen and ushered in video playback.

Telechips is a famous MP3 chip manufacturer in Korea. Its decoding chip is based on ARM architecture, which has excellent performance and sound quality. Once it came out, it won unanimous praise and grew rapidly with the strong support of many Korean manufacturers. This is a promising decoding chip. However, the development of Telechip in China market is relatively low-key due to the high requirements for peripheral circuit design. With the advent of color screen and video era, with the introduction of many excellent machines, Telechip chips are gradually recognized by people. In addition to iAudio U3 and Samsung K5 using TCC770 chip, there are iAudio D2 using TCC780 1 and iRiver Clix2 using TCC8200.

Since we mentioned the Telechip master control chip with powerful expansibility, we have to mention the "dual-core architecture". The most familiar with Telechip is the British Wolfman audio chip. With the great success of Taipower T29 with TCC770+WM8750S and Taipower T39 with TCC8200+WM8978G, many domestic players know the strong performance of T-core, and also let many walkman fans feel the pure timbre of Ousheng Wolfman. This not only established T39 as the king of domestic MP3 sound quality and continues to this day, but also made Wolfman audio chip gain a broader market.

After years of development, Samsung Electronics has become one of the few leading enterprises in the electronic industry to master the research, development and production technology of a number of basic components, and Samsung has indirectly become the initiator of the MP3 industry. However, Samsung's chip has never been as powerful as its name. However, with the launch of Meizu Miniplayer, people have personally felt the ability of Samsung's main control chip. In order to continue the tradition of "flying core", Meizu adopted the SA58700X07 of Samsung based on the 200MHZ ARM9TDMI core, and further removed the Wolfson 873 1 audio processor from the main control, and adopted the 380HN audio codec improved by Philips from UDA 1380. In fact, with the expansion of multi-functions such as video playback, the advantages of "flying core" have long faded, and Miniplayer also ushered in a more popular European sound WM8987 audio chip in the later revised SL version. Anyway, on the whole, all aspects of Miniplayer design is a milestone of domestic MP3.

Meg X750 with ADI BF533 scheme

With the increasing demand for video in portable computers and the popularity of flash memory chips, the large AVI format can no longer meet the demands of domestic consumers, so the voice of supporting RMVB format is growing. At this time, the BF533 chip introduced by American analog devices (ADI) made RMVB live broadcast achieve revolutionary results. Today, this chip is still the main control chip of RMVB models of many manufacturers. BF533 based on Blackfin architecture has two specifications, 500MHz and 600MHz, which have both the high-speed data processing ability of DSP and the system management ability of CPU, so it can ensure good performance in signal processing and control processing.

Powerful Aiko 605 wifi

At the same time, Aviva, a famous PMP manufacturer, introduced Aviva 605, which adopted the TI scheme which has always been famous for its high performance and high specification. Its main control chip is the high-end chip of TI-T 1320. Although TI did not disclose the relevant parameters of the chip, judging from the strong performance of the 605, the performance of this chip is estimated to be unmatched by the current PMP products. Of course, strong performance naturally brings high prices.

The first RK27 chip player Blue Devil RM970

Not only foreign technology-leading manufacturers continue to carry out technological innovation, but also domestic manufacturers with more strength are constantly making efforts in technology. Headquartered in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, Ruixinwei is a domestic chip design enterprise focusing on the research and development of digital audio and video and mobile multimedia chips. As early as 2006, RK2606A chip launched by Ruixinwei quickly became the first brand in the domestic MP3 chip market with its low cost advantage. Now Ruixinwei's solution to support RMVB is its latest RK27 scheme, which adopts the "dual-core combination" mode of DSP core and +ARM core, and the frequency of the main control chip is 400MHz. In addition to supporting various video formats including RMVB, it also supports lossless compressed audio formats such as APE and FLAC, as well as MP3 (bit rate range from 8 kbps to 384 kbps) and WMA (bit rate range from 32 kbps to 320 kbps). In addition, it can also be equipped with Microsoft PlayFX sound effects. Compared with the previous solutions of TI and ADI, the cost of Ruixin microchip is lower, and the cost of a Ruixin microchip is generally only half of that of ADI's chip, so the price of Ruixin's terminal products is much lower, which is closer to the consumption power of the public.

After introducing V2000 with ADI chip, Aino introduced V2000SE with lower price but the same function.

In addition to Ruixinwei, Junhuazheng Xinfei is another dark horse in the domestic microelectronics industry. Huaxin Fei's RMVB solution is slightly different from other companies' solutions. In fact, this scheme was jointly completed by two companies. The main control chip was provided by Beijing Zheng Jun, and the scheme design was completed by Huaxin Fei. Moreover, this scheme is also the lowest cost scheme in the current scheme. On the RMVB solution of Huaxinfei, the main control chip is JZ4740 chip provided by Beijing Zheng Jun. This chip is a general-purpose 32-bit CPU, which can run on WINCE or LINUX operating system and has low power consumption. Under the same resources, the power consumption of JZ4740 is 50-70% of other main control chips. With low cost, low energy consumption and good performance, Huaxin Aircraft has occupied its own sky in the RMVB market.

Things to be dealt with later (when telling a story)

In the past ten years, we have played a supporting role behind the dazzling array of products from MPman F 10 to COWON Q5W. It is the vigorous development of microelectronics technology. The progress of domestic manufacturers is obvious to all, but the gap between our thinking and technology and the world level can not be ignored. Ten years later, the number of machines is difficult to count, and the complexity of the scheme is even more difficult to explain. I hope that in the days to come, the development of science and technology and the competition in the market will bring us more surprises and make our life more colorful.