Customer Success - Harman-Kardon

Harman-Kardon Beats the Competition to Market with Spartan FPGAs "Our competition didn't make it to market and we did. We certainly reaped the benefits of time-to-market." Harman-Kardon CEO  Tom McLoughlin

In 1999, Harman  began developing a dual-well CD recorder.  This product was going to be the first of its kind in the industry offering consumers a four fold increase in recording speed to make a digital copy of favorite CDs or treasured vinyl records. The CDR 2 also offered exceptional sonic performance and unmatched recording flexibility. It would be the first of its kind in the industry but only if Harman could beat the competition -- time-to-market was crucial and the goal was the Christmas selling season.

"We chose the Xilinx Spartan FPGAs for our CDR recorders because they met the time-to-market and low-cost requirements and provided us with the flexibility to make last minute changes," said Harman-Kardon CEO Tom McLoughlin.

Harman-Kardon heavily relied on the Xilinx Spartan FPGAs to develop their CDR 30 and the value-priced CDR 20 CD Recorders.  The Spartan FPGAs provided Harman Kardon with the necessary flexibility as well as enabled them to attain the fastest time-to-market.

"Our competition didn't make it to market and we did," McLoughlin said.  "We certainly reaped the benefits of time-to-market."

With a long list of technological breakthroughs in the high-fidelity audio and visual market, Harman-Kardon is known for its exceptional and revolutionary products and recognizes the importance of time-to-market. The company plans to continue developing innovative and groundbreaking technology with the help of Xilinx products.  McLoughlin said they are going to move from their current generation of products to new categories of products using display technology, which is a different interface technology.

"The new generation of products will require the flexibility and also the time-to-market requirements that we've had in the past," McLoughlin said.  "The Xilinx products will fit very well into that model."

All Harman Kardon CD products are designed with advanced technology, such
as precision digital-to-analog converters, to provide crisp, clear reproduction of your favorite discs. For the ultimate in CD playback, the FL 8550 and FL 8370 include High Definition Compatible Digital® (HDCD®) processing for improved dynamics and presence from HDCD-encoded discs, and enhanced playback of standard CDs. 

Taking CDs to another dimension, Harman Kardon's CDR 2 is a dual-drawer recorder/player that allows users to make a digital copy of favorite CDs or treasured vinyl records. As the world's first 4-times speed CD-R/RW recorder, the CDR 2 can make a copy of a 60-minute CD for personal use in just 15 minutes. Equally adept at playing CDs as recording them, the CDR 2 features audiophile-grade AKM 96kHz/24-bit DACs for superb playback quality. 

The Xilinx Spartan series was created to displace low-end ASICs in volume production by providing the advantages of fast development-to-production time and in-system reprogrammability at competitive prices.  Using an advanced process technology, Spartan series FPGAs substantially reduced die size over the previous generation of FPGAs while measurably improving gate density and performance. 

Introduced in January of 2000, the Spartan-II family offers some of the most advanced FPGA technologies available today, including programmable support for multiple I/O standards (including 5V tolerance), on-chip block RAM and digital delay lock loops for both chip-level and board-level clock management.
Spartan-II devices can now replace complex ASSP functions such as a MIPS-PCI bridge, Viterbi-Reed Solomon decoders, and quad data rate RAM (QDR) memory controllers. In these applications, the use of efficient IP allows the Spartan-II FPGA to be more economical than the currently available ASSP solutions. In addition, the features of the Spartan-II devices provide superior value by eliminating the need for many simple ASSPs such as phase lock loops, FIFOs, I/O translators and system bus drivers that in the past have been necessary to complete a system design. 

Operating at 2.5 volts and featuring a unique power down mode, the features in the Spartan-II FPGAs allow them to address a wider range of cost sensitive products such as telephone handsets, laptop PCs, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other high volume consumer electronics applications such as PC add-on cards, digital modems, DVD players, portable audio (such as MP3), on-demand TV recorders and set-top boxes. 

For more information on Harman, visit their website at www.harman.com

More Information Products Application Notes Press Releases Hard Copy Literature Request