Oki Electric Industry intros "world's smallest MP3 chip"
By Darren Murph 
posted September 15th 2006 6:05PM
posted September 15th 2006 6:05PM
As decreasing chip sizes seems to be all the rage these days, Japan's Oki Electric Industry isn't missing out on its own opportunity to go small. The company recently announced that sample shipments of the "world's smallest MP3 playback chip" were being dispersed, and that manufacturers of cellphones, PDAs, MP3 players (clearly), and essentially anything in which MP3 playback could be crammed into should take notice. The minuscule module -- dubbed the ML2011 -- packs an MP3 decoder and 650mW amplifier onto a 3.6mm x 4.2mm wafer, and can be conveniently paired with Oki's reference board and "SoundLib" software in order to bypass that whole headache-inducing "playback software development" phase. If you can spare just a tad more room, and want something that's instantly mountable, the 5mm x 6mm QFN-packaged version is also on the horizon. While pricing details were kept under wraps, Oki plans to ramp up full scale production by December, and will probably lobby mighty hard to get under the hood of Motorola's next cash cow.[Via CrissCross]
Motorola does not use hardware MP3 decoders. Any device with a processor sophisticated enough to manage things like EDGE, HSDPA, nVidia GPUs,etc certainly has enough horsepower to implement a SW MP3 decoder.
thats also why all mp3 players on motorola phones have sucked. Sluggish mp3 players don't make for a good sell. By unloading that to the chip, they can put that processing power to use elsewhere.
Sure, but what is the sound-to-noise ratio? Hopefully something decent.
Who cares about S/N ratio. Most Mp3's sound terrible anyways, especially over a device that can fit in your shirt pocket.