Overview MP3 is rapidly becoming the defacto standard for the delivery of high quality music on the Internet. This technology has been well received as evidenced by the over 5 million MP3 software plug-ins that have been downloaded to date. This is a testament to the future potential of the MP3 technology considering the relatively limited marketing it has received. The benefits of purchasing music on line far surpass those of purchasing other products on line. Because the music is stored in a digital format on the hard drive of a server, the music is always in stock; the consumer can try before buying, and doesn't have to wait for a delivery truck to deliver the music - it's instantly downloaded to his hard drive. This is perhaps as close as you can get to instant gratification. These very compelling benefits may cause the traditional record store to become obsolete. MP3 is a compressed digital audio format that keeps the file size small without losing the quality of the original audio. MP3 allows audio files to be compressed to approximately 1/11th of the original size. For example, a typical music CD consumes 650MB, using MP3 the same audio only takes 55MB. This has allowed music to be stored on the PCs hard drive, allowing users to effortlessly create and customize music play lists. Perhaps one of the more interesting applications of MP3 technology is in the construction of a portable music player. The compression achieved by MP3 makes it practical to construct a portable audio player based upon FLASH memory as the storage medium. The benefits to a solid state player are many such as being impervious to shock and vibration, no degradation of media over multiple plays, extremely small form factor, and low power consumption and long battery life due to the elimination of high current consumption devices, such as motors. There are several other formats beyond MP3 being discussed, some with better compression algorithms, others with advanced copyright security and some with both such as a2b, EPAC, TwinVQ, MPEG-4. Xilinx Solutions The Xilinx Spartan-II FPGA and CoolRunner CPLD programmable logic solutions offer the flexibility to build products that can be reprogrammed in the field at costs far below any programmable solution. Please view the presentation to see how Xilinx solutions can help you build products for this fast evolving market place.