One of the industry’s leading mp3 chip suppliers PortalPlayer has today unveiled its debut flash market product that could potentially triple the iPod‘s current battery life.

The PP5022 System-on-Chip (SoC) requires a significantly less amount of power to function than other chips despite working at a higher audio and photo quality level.

PortalPlayer’s vice president of sales and marketing Michael Maia commented: “Our goal with the PP5022 was to offer a solution that balances lowest operating power while continuing to increase system performance.

“We achieved this goal and will continue to deliver the lowest operational power during playback and encoding of rich media content-the PP5022 is our most innovative SoC to date, resulting in best-in-class battery life in hard drive jukebox systems.”

Available as from the second half of 2005, PortalPlayer’s PP5022 SoC will cost just £4.99.

In a related announcement, PortalPlayer also today introduced its debut flash-based, the fully-integrated solution PP5024 System-in-Package.