METHOD AND CIRCUIT FOR BUFFERING A STREAM OF DATA

摘要

Energy still is a precious commodity for portable consumer devices. In such devices, data is usually read from a mass storage device like a harddisk, buffered in a solid state memory and then rendered (processed) for reproduction over usually headphones (and a screen when applicable). The invention is aimed at more efficient use of the buffer memory, which is usually divided in compartments. The invention is based on the recognition that individual compartments of a (e.g.) dynamic buffer memory should be emptied as fast as possible as compared to gradually reading data from various compartments of the memory. In this way, considerable amounts of energy can be saved as an inactive memory compartment consumes less power than an active memory compartment.