1. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to portable electronic equipment and more particularly to integrated circuits used within such portable electronic equipment.
2. Description of Related Art
As is known, integrated circuits are used in a wide variety of electronic equipment, including portable, or handheld, devices. Such handheld devices include personal digital assistants (PDA), CD players, MP3 players, DVD players, AM/FM radio, a pager, cellular telephones, computer memory extension (commonly referred to as a thumb drive or USB flash disk), etc. Each of these handheld devices includes one or more integrated circuits to provide the functionality of the device. For example, a thumb drive may include an integrated circuit for interfacing with a computer (e.g., personal computer, laptop, server, workstation, etc.) via one of the ports of the computer (e.g., Universal Serial Bus (USB), parallel port, FireWire, etc.) and at least one other memory integrated circuit (e.g., flash memory). As such, when the thumb drive is coupled to a computer, data can be read from and written to the memory of the thumb drive. Accordingly, a user may store personalized information (e.g., presentations, Internet access account information, etc.) on his/her thumb drive and use any computer to access the information.
As another example, an MP3 player may include multiple integrated circuits to support the storage and playback of digitally formatted audio (e.g., formatted in accordance with the MP3 specification). As is known, one integrated circuit may be used for interfacing with a computer, another integrated circuit for generating a power supply voltage, another for processing the storage and/or playback of the digitally formatted audio data, and still another for rendering the playback of the digitally formatted audio data audible.
As is further known, integrated circuits have enabled the creation of a plethora of handheld devices, however, to be “wired” in today's electronic world, a person needs to posses multiple handheld devices. For example, one may own a cellular telephone for cellular telephone service, a PDA for scheduling, address book, etc., one or more thumb drives for extended memory functionality, an MP3 player for storage and/or playback of digitally recorded music, a radio, etc. Thus, even though a single handheld device may be relatively small, carrying multiple handheld devices on one's person can become quite burdensome.
Further, each manufacturer of such handheld devices typically offers different look and feel (e.g., features, functions, input/output configurations, etc.) of its handheld devices to distinguish itself in the market place. Still further, a manufacturer may offer several versions of a handheld device with varying feature sets to appeal to multiple market groups. Accordingly, such manufacturers require a multitude of integrated circuits to accommodate their various handheld products. From an integrated circuit manufacturer's perspective, they are required to develop multiple integrated circuits for each of their handheld manufacturing clients or, at a minimum, develop client specific integrated circuits for each handheld manufacturing client tat includes multiple features that may or may not be used. As is well known in the integrated circuit field, having to develop multiple versions of essentially the same integrated circuit is costly and substantially impacts profit margins. As is further known, including multiple features on an integrated circuit increases the integrated circuit's pin count, which further adds to the cost of the integrated circuit.
Therefore, a need exists for a configurable integrated circuit that provides multiple functions for use in various handheld devices.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds