As another year comes to a close, it's once again time to do some crystal ball gazing. With hoards of digital still cameras, portable media players, AV enabled cell phones, jukeboxes, media centers, DTV receivers, gaming stations and many more like devices emerging in mainstream consumer electronics, it is becoming obvious that these products are here to stay. The last few years have seen a lot of breakthrough innovations in this area and this coupled with a fast growing customer base is going to make 2006 the year of portable infotainment.
Rapid evolution of these products has kept the device manufacturers on their toes with adaptation becoming a major challenge. The devices move from one generation to the next very fast, reducing the cycle time to less than a year. The mix and match of features across different products is mainly driven by media content availability on the Internet. The media content available for download is becoming a booming business in itself. Also, the codec requirements (both audio and video) are prone to change fast due to innovation in the multimedia technology.
Memory technology including SD/MMC, HDD, CF, Flash, and so on is making huge advances. On-screen displays, camera modules/optics and peripheral interfaces are becoming much more mature. Supporting multiple operating systems (WinCE, Linux, Symbian) allows the portable devices to interact with a host PC and applications running on them.
Instant boot-up is one key requirement for these devices that can boot up from multiple options and it becomes inevitable for the SoCs in them to support booting up from non-volatile memory devices including EEPROM, NOR and NAND Flash, secondary storage such as SD/MMC card, USB, and so on. A huge amount of protected media content (including DRM), upgradeable firmware and software downloads, makes the device booting secure in several cases. These new generation gadgets have internal memory of the order of Giga bytes. Hence to reduce the system cost, manufacturers want the boot-image also as part of the internal memory.
These portable devices need to be extremely stringent in their power consumption. Semiconductor manufacturers play a pivotal role in lowering the power consumption of their chips and helping reduce full system power.
What used to be just cell phones few years back are becoming enabled with digital imaging and audio/video player functionalities. They act as PDAs, email clients, Web browsers, and more every day. A huge progress is also being made in convergence of these multimedia devices into a single device, which can have most of these features (if not all). We already have products extending these system capabilities to support features like Digital TV reception complying with standards like DVB-H, DMB and ISDB. Digital convergence in terms of home and office connectivity coupled with infotainment is also becoming the buzzword.
The future visibly has a lot of challenges, however, portable infotainment is all set to create a revolution just like the PC revolution happened in the last decade. But, are the semiconductor vendors ready to aid this? Texas Instruments says "Yes" with its innovative DaVinci Technology to enable video and audio infotainment.
