If you work on electronic designs, then you’ve probably had to make a decision about dividing your project between hardware and software. The duality of hardware and software has some similarities to dualities in physics such as mass/energy and wave/particles.

Back in 2003, I built myself a simple MP3 player (“Build an MP3 Player,” Circuit Cellar 152, March 2003). The main part of the project was a specialized chip for performing MP3 decoding. Since then, significant progress has been made in audio and chip technology. Thus, it’s possible to build a similar media player with simpler hardware and more powerful software. A great example of such a system is the digital audio player I’ll describe in this article. The system is an embedded hardware/software solution for 16-bit digital audio.