Re: F21 Market

[Tor Silfverberg <d97tsi@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

> I remember a while back one of the main problems with getting F21
> in production was finding a market. I guess set-top boxes were the
> original idea. In order to get the unit cost down to a reasonable 
> level, you would have to fab many (at least 100K) I think. But that
> costs money. So it was kind of a catch 22. I was thinking maybe using
> them to make mp3 players kind of like the Rio. With the video and serial 
> interface on the chip you could do some interesting things with it.
> 
> Like transferring data between two devices or a PC - wire (USB?) or Ir.
>    - if it has USB connectivity, you could hook up almost anything to it.
> Showing titles of songs, graphics on a TV monitor.
> It has a/d d/a converter so wouldn't need sound chip (could you do stereo
> on it maybe by multiplexing?) Could record sounds to memory.
> could even download music with the device, without using PC.
> Heck you could almost use it as a PC.
> 
> Does this sound feasible? I'm pretty sure it has the horsepower.
> 
> -lonnie

I'm not sure... certainly the cpu has the power, the problem would probably be 
the analog parts. The D/A is only 8(?) bits, not much for quality audio. Sure 
mpeg3 isn't really a high end audio standard, but 8 bits is a little bit 
scarse even for this. Don't know about multiplexing... probably possible if 
you build som kind of capacitive switched net. If the D/A is fast enough it is 
probably possible. In theory, you could even improve the effective number of 
bits output by some kind of hybrid bitstream switched net thing, but this 
would need some serious work. Certainly not worth the effort for mp3. Perhapse 
you could use the video port for second channel in stereo mode... ah, your 
second mail ;-). The video port is very programmable it seems, see the 
discussion on the video processor going on right now. I guess what I say is 
that it would probably work for low-end stuff, possibly stereo using the 
video-port, but I wouldn't try it if care is for sound quality.

Regards,

	/Tor Silfverberg