The Silicon Audio: The World's First All Solid-State Audio Player with a Semiconductor Memory Card

A new audio-data compression and storage system, the Silicon Audio, is presented. It employs the MPEG / Audio Layer II algorithm for data compression, which has been standardized by ISO (Inter-national Standardization Organization). A semiconductor memory card is equipped with to store the compressed signal. Since it has no mechanical movement, it is robust against vibration that had been a serious problem for portable audio players. The background of the development, implementations, challenges toward a commercial product, and impact on audio players as well as personal information devices are discussed.