According to iSuppli Corp.'s, Broadcom has landed as a new supplier among Apple’s iPod semiconductor partners, providing its new BCM2722 VideoCore multimedia processor to handle the video functionality.

iSuppli discovered the technology’s inclusion in a dissection conducted this week by the firm’s Teardown Analysis service of the new video-capable iPod.

The Broadcom chip and other ICs account for 17 percent of the $151 total bill-of-materials (BOM) cost for the 30GByte iPod, according to iSuppli. Other key cost drivers include the hard disk drive and the display, which together account for another 70 percent of the BOM.

The firm noted that while Apple's use of the Broadcom chip is new, the company relied on a mix of old and new suppliers for other key semiconductors in its latest iPod. The old suppliers include PortalPlayer and Wolfson Microelectronics, whose chips have appeared in several iPod generations, and Cypress Semiconductor, which scored its first iPod win with the Nano.

Broadcom’s attraction to the consumer electronics market has been made clear. The company, in addition to this, supplies chips for various set-top boxes while continuing to grow its wireless presence. In 2004, Broadcom grew its consumer-electronics-related semiconductor revenue by a staggering 143 percent, according to iSuppli. While the iPod win may help the company continue that growth, the firm said, it is still too early to predict which supplier will dominate video processing in portable devices.

"With the market for portable media player semiconductors essentially doubling to $6.4 billion in 2009, the stakes in the portable video-processing market are high,” said Chris Crotty, senior analyst for consumer electronics at iSuppli, in a research note today.

Broadcom could not be reached for immediate comment. A company issued press release on Monday announced the production of the BCM2722, describing the chip as having 5 mega-pixel digital camera support, MPEG-4 VGA or H.264 CIF video encoding/decoding at 30 frames per second, TV output and integrated 32Mbits of embedded SDRAM in a single package.

By: DocMemory
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