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From the company's home page: Crack open the majority of music jukeboxes today and inside you'll find PortalPlayer silicon and software. We are the leading provider of the core technologies behind the next generation of consumer electronics devices — personal media players that capture, store, playback and display your entire collection of music, photos, images and video. portalplayer.com From Electronics DesignChain (Summer 2002): Inside the Apple iPod Design Triumph By Erik Sherman Steve Jobs is recognizably the top cheerleader for Apple's products. And the inventor of such hyperbole as "insanely great" has not abandoned that characteristic for the company's iPod MP3 player. "With iPod, Apple has invented a whole new category of digital music player that lets you put your entire music collection in your pocket and listen to it wherever you go," the Apple CEO said when he introduced the product in October 2001. "With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again." Although no one could accuse Apple, let alone Jobs, of being shy about product promotion, it's a different story when it comes to its engineering and building processes. The company has always been tighter lipped than the Pentagon when it comes to releasing design chain details. But that hasn't prevented some companies from satisfying their curiosity about what's inside the advanced MP3 player. Some serious reverse engineering and discussion within the electronics industry unearthed unusual details of Apple's development process. It turns out that much of the underlying iPod design was performed by outside companies. The Cupertino folk haven't given up on their heritage of design excellence—they're just bowing to some inevitable directions in consumer electronics by borrowing from established experts linked together for what may be the first design chain for the iPod. A Unique Design Chain Approach Realizing that the MP3 market was still in its infancy, Apple developed a layered design chain tuned for an early-stage market to create the iPod. Even more unusual for Apple, it relied on a platform and reference design created by a third party, PortalPlayer, of Santa Clara, Calif. Founded in 1999, PortalPlayer has a stellar cast of Silicon Valley executives and investors, including renowned venture capitalist Gordon Campbell. PortalPlayer had developed a base platform for a variety of audio systems, including portable digital music devices, general audio systems and streaming audio receivers. It appears that Apple picked PortalPlayer because its design expertise yielded the highest quality of sound, according to industry sources. Because of the unusually restrictive nondisclosure agreements in place among Apple, PortalPlayer and other members of the sub-design chain, key officials were not able to directly comment on their work with Apple. However, some members of the subchain provided Electronics Design Chain Magazine with a glimpse inside the iPod core. Once Apple and PortalPlayer became design chain partners, PortalPlayer then selected other design chain members and managed the design process. Four key criteria were behind the selection of other members of the design chain, none unusual for a consumer electronics product: highest quality sound off-the-shelf components cost time to market Under the Hood The trail to find iPod's design chain starts with some reverse engineering of the device by Portelligent Inc., an Austin, Texas, firm providing product and technology intelligence for consumer electronics companies. "First and foremost, the product was elegantly designed in classic Apple fashion," says David Carey, president of Portelligent. "They did product design from the outside in." Carey says the company had a vision of what the player should be and what it should look like. The subsequent design parameters were dictated by its appearance and form factor. That outside-in perspective helped determine a number of the components, including the planar lithium battery from Sony and the 1.8-inch Toshiba hard drive, which is the only company presently manufacturing that form factor. The essential units—battery, hard drive and circuit board—are layered, one atop the next. "It was very thoughtful layering and nesting of the components mechanically," Carey adds. "There's not a lot of unused volume inside [the iPod]." The rest of the device uses a dedicated MP3 decoder and controller chip from PortalPlayer, a Wolfson Microelectronics Ltd. stereo digital-to-analog converter, a flash memory chip from Sharp Electronics Corp., a Texas Instruments 1394 firewire interface controller, and a power management and battery charging IC from Linear Technologies Inc. What Apple conspicuously did not do is use an ASIC or other custom chip to integrate all the functions it needed onto one piece of silicon, which would have presumably saved space and battery life. <snip> designchain.com | ||||||||||||||
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