Sign in

Private company

PortalPlayer

Logo: PortalPlayer Inc., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons3

American semiconductor company

PortalPlayer, Inc., founded in 1999, was a fabless semiconductor company that supplied system-on-a-chip semiconductors, firmware and software for personal media players. The company handled semiconductor design and firmware development, while subcontracting the actual semiconductor manufacturing to merchant foundries. It gained recognition as the company with which Apple contracted for the development of the original iPod.2 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

1999Founded1
  • HeadquartersCalifornia1

See how the biggest companies compare on our leaderboards

PortalPlayer, Inc., founded in 1999, was a fabless semiconductor company that supplied system-on-a-chip semiconductors, firmware and software for personal media players. The company handled semiconductor design and firmware development, while subcontracting the actual semiconductor manufacturing to merchant foundries.2

Products and brands

  • system on a chip

Listed on Wikidata.1

PortalPlayer 5002

Dual ARM7TDMI cores with shared SRAM (3x 32KB banks). Errata in memory controller leads to halved data cache performance but fast SRAM. As the ARM7TDMI does not support cache coherency, individual ARM7TDMI cores do not have coherent views of DRAM. Custom logic is used to introduce coherency into the SRAM.

Used by the following devices:

iPod: Generations 1, 2 and 3

PortalPlayer 5003

System-on-a-chip containing two ARM7 CPU cores, each running at up to 90 MHz. Fixes 5002 cache bug greatly improving performance of DRAM.

Read the full text

Used by the following devices:

Rio Karma

PortalPlayer 5020

System-on-a-chip containing two ARM CPU cores, each running at 75 MHz. Expanded SRAM to 4 banks (128KB) using a crossbar style switch.

Used by the following devices:

iPod: Generation 4, iPod Photo, and first generation iPod Mini

Philips HDD100/120 (Unconfirmed)

Tatung Elio M310 (system/pp5020.mi4 contains the string "PP5020AF-05.11-TG01-11.40-TG01-11.40-DT" and "Copyright(c) 1999 - 2003 PortalPlayer, Inc.")

Virgin player 5GB

MSI Megaplayer 540, has firmware system/pp5020.mi4 including "PP5020AF..." string, in Germany it has been sold as Medion MD81034 by ALDI

iriver H10, all variations, including the 5GB, 6GB, and 20GB models

Edirol R-1 (Unconfirmed rumor on what chip but unit displays "Powered by PortalPlay Inc. 1999-2004"

M-AUDIO Microtrack ver.1 " string pp5020d-tf"

Olympus m:robe MR-100

PortalPlayer 5021C-TDF

Used by the following devices:

iPod: First generation iPod Nano and fifth generation iPod with video

PortalPlayer 5022

SRAM is no longer partitioned into fast and slower banks; all have uniform access speed.

Used by the following devices:

iPod: Second generation iPod Mini

Philips: GoGear HDD1630/HDD6320/HDD6330 > PP 5022 + codec Wolfson WM8731L

PortalPlayer 5024

PP5022 with integrated Austria Microsystems AS3514 DAC and power management chip.

Used by the following devices:

Sandisk Sansa e200 series

Philips GoGear SA9200

PortalPlayer APX

PortalPlayer's application processor series.

Used by:

Microsoft Zune HD

The current generation NVIDIA Tegra mobile processors

From Wikipedia’s article on PortalPlayer, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4

Timeline

  1. 1999Founded Founded1

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4