Xilinx Solution Summary

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 to date. 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H 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 one can get to instant gratification! These very compelling benefits hold the promise of causing 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: impervious to shock and vibration, no degradation of media over multiple plays, extremely small form factor, and low power consumption / long battery life due to the elimination of high current consumption devices, typically motors.

Xilinx programmable logic plays a major part in this exciting and explosive market. Xilinx CoolRunner XPLA3 and Spartan-II offer low power and low cost solutions that can be used to overcome the significant challenges facing the designers of portable Internet audio players.