Industry | Semiconductors |
---|---|
Founded | 1999 |
Defunct | 2007 |
Fate | Acquired by Nvidia |
Headquarters | |
Area served | Worldwide |
Products | SoCs |
PortalPlayer, Inc., founded in 1999, was a fabless semiconductor company that supplied system-on-a-chip semiconductors, firmware and software for personal media players. The company handled semiconductor design and firmware development, while subcontracting the actual semiconductor manufacturing to merchant foundries.
It gained recognition as the company with which Apple contracted for development of the original iPod. [1] [2] The company went public with an IPO in November 2004 and traded on the NASDAQ under ticker symbol PLAY. [3] Sales to Apple grew to 90% of the company's gross revenue, which ultimately hurt the company when Apple switched media processor chip vendors in its iPod lines. [4]
On January 5, 2007, Nvidia Corporation announced that it had acquired PortalPlayer, Inc. for about $357 million. [5] [6]
Dual ARM7TDMI cores with shared SRAM (3x 32KB banks). Errata in memory controller leads to halved data cache performance but fast SRAM. As the ARM7TDMI does not support cache coherency, individual ARM7TDMI cores do not have coherent views of DRAM. Custom logic is used to introduce coherency into the SRAM.
Used by the following devices:
System-on-a-chip containing two ARM7 CPU cores, each running at up to 90 MHz. Fixes 5002 cache bug greatly improving performance of DRAM.
Used by the following devices:
System-on-a-chip containing two ARM CPU cores, each running at 75 MHz. Expanded SRAM to 4 banks (128KB) using a crossbar style switch.
Used by the following devices:
Used by the following devices:
SRAM is no longer partitioned into fast and slower banks; all have uniform access speed.
Used by the following devices:
PP5022 with integrated Austria Microsystems AS3514 DAC and power management chip.
Used by the following devices:
PortalPlayer's application processor series.
Used by:
iPodLinux is a μClinux-based Linux distribution designed specifically to run on Apple Inc.'s iPod. When the iPodLinux kernel is booted it takes the place of Apple's iPod operating system and automatically loads Podzilla, an alternative GUI and launcher for a number of additional included programs such as a video player, an image viewer, a command line shell, games, emulators for video game consoles, programming demos, and other experimental or occasionally unfinished software.
ARM7 is a group of 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by ARM Holdings for microcontroller use. The ARM7 core family consists of ARM700, ARM710, ARM7DI, ARM710a, ARM720T, ARM740T, ARM710T, ARM7TDMI, ARM7TDMI-S, ARM7EJ-S. The ARM7TDMI and ARM7TDMI-S were the most popular cores of the family.
A free and open-source graphics device driver is a software stack which controls computer-graphics hardware and supports graphics-rendering application programming interfaces (APIs) and is released under a free and open-source software license. Graphics device drivers are written for specific hardware to work within a specific operating system kernel and to support a range of APIs used by applications to access the graphics hardware. They may also control output to the display if the display driver is part of the graphics hardware. Most free and open-source graphics device drivers are developed by the Mesa project. The driver is made up of a compiler, a rendering API, and software which manages access to the graphics hardware.
The iPod Nano is a discontinued portable media player designed and formerly marketed by Apple Inc. The first-generation model was introduced on September 7, 2005, as a replacement for the iPod Mini, using flash memory for storage. The iPod Nano went through several models, or generations, after its introduction. Apple discontinued the iPod Nano on July 27, 2017.
SigmaTel, Inc., was an American system-on-a-chip (SoC), electronics and software company headquartered in Austin, Texas, that designed AV media player/recorder SoCs, reference circuit boards, SoC software development kit reference designs used to make media players for Apple iPod Shuffle, Samsung, Sony Walkman and 150 others built around a custom cooperative kernel and all SoC device drivers including USB mass storage and AV decoder DSP, media player/recorder apps, and controller chips for multifunction peripherals. SigmaTel became Austin's largest IPO as of 2003 when it became publicly traded on NASDAQ. The company was driven by a talented mix of electrical and computer engineers plus other professionals with semiconductor industry experience in Silicon Hills, the number two IC design region in the United States, after Silicon Valley.
The boot ROM is a type of ROM that is used for booting a computer system. There are two types: a mask boot ROM that cannot be changed afterwards and a boot EEPROM.
The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device. It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity. The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a die, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is. A better indication of this is transistor density which is the ratio of a semiconductor's transistor count to its die area.
The following comparison of portable media players compares general and technical information for notable digital playback devices.
An iPod click wheel game or iPod game is a video game playable on the various versions of the Apple portable media player, the iPod. The original iPod had the game Brick included as an easter egg hidden feature; later firmware versions added it as a menu option. Later revisions of the iPod added three more games in addition to Brick: Parachute, Solitaire, and Music Quiz. Apple later offered iPod games for sale through the iTunes store. These games should not be confused with games for the iPod Touch, which require iOS and are only available on Apple's App Store.
The "14 nanometer process" refers to a marketing term for the MOSFET technology node that is the successor to the "22 nm" node. The "14 nm" was so named by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). Until about 2011, the node following "22 nm" was expected to be "16 nm". All "14 nm" nodes use FinFET technology, a type of multi-gate MOSFET technology that is a non-planar evolution of planar silicon CMOS technology.
SanDisk has produced a number of flash memory-based digital audio and portable media players since 2005. The current range of products bears the SanDisk Clip name. SanDisk players were formerly marketed under the Sansa name until 2014.
ARM11 is a group of 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by ARM Holdings. The ARM11 core family consists of ARM1136J(F)-S, ARM1156T2(F)-S, ARM1176JZ(F)-S, and ARM11MPCore. Since ARM11 cores were released from 2002 to 2005, they are no longer recommended for new IC designs, instead ARM Cortex-A and ARM Cortex-R cores are preferred.
The iPod Classic is a discontinued portable media player created and formerly marketed by Apple Inc.
The Sansa Fuze is a portable media player developed by SanDisk and released on March 8, 2008. The Fuze is available in three different Flash memory capacities: 2 GB, 4 GB, and 8 GB and comes in six different colors: black, blue, pink, red, silver, and white. Storage is expandable via a microSDHC slot with capacity up to 32 GB, and unofficially to 64 GB or more via FAT32 formatted SDXC cards. All models have a 1.9 inch TFT LCD display with a resolution of 220 by 176 pixels and a built-in monaural microphone and FM tuner; recordings of the latter two are saved as PCM WAV files.
Arm Holdings plc is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England, whose primary business is the design of central processing unit (CPU) cores that implement the ARM architecture family of instruction sets. It also designs other chips, provides software development tools under the DS-5, RealView and Keil brands, and provides systems and platforms, system-on-a-chip (SoC) infrastructure and software. As a "holding" company, it also holds shares of other companies. Since 2016, it has been majority owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group.
POWER8 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA, announced in August 2013 at the Hot Chips conference. The designs are available for licensing under the OpenPOWER Foundation, which is the first time for such availability of IBM's highest-end processors.
Project Denver is the codename of a central processing unit designed by Nvidia that implements the ARMv8-A 64/32-bit instruction sets using a combination of simple hardware decoder and software-based binary translation where "Denver's binary translation layer runs in software, at a lower level than the operating system, and stores commonly accessed, already optimized code sequences in a 128 MB cache stored in main memory". Denver is a very wide in-order superscalar pipeline. Its design makes it suitable for integration with other SIPs cores into one die constituting a system on a chip (SoC).
In semiconductor manufacturing, the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems defines the "5 nm" process as the MOSFET technology node following the "7 nm" node. In 2020, Samsung and TSMC entered volume production of "5 nm" chips, manufactured for companies including Apple, Huawei, Mediatek, Qualcomm and Marvell.
Apple silicon refers to a series of system on a chip (SoC) and system in a package (SiP) processors designed by Apple Inc., mainly using the ARM architecture. They are the basis of Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, AirPods, AirTag, HomePod, and Apple Vision Pro devices.
Crystal HD is Broadcom's hardware semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) core that performs video decoding.