Renesas Introduces 324mhz, 583-MIPS SuperH Microprocessor For Multimedia And Office Automation Applications
Brian Davis, director of business development, system LSI business unit at Renesas Technology America, Inc., said, "The surge in the speed and processing power of embedded microprocessors, combined with their broader arrays of more capable peripheral functions, is enabling better performing products for diverse markets. Our SH7764 delivers design-enabling features with good power efficiency at economical prices. While it's primarily aimed at high-performance multimedia devices such as audio systems, digital media players, and car navigation systems, this versatile chip is also an excellent solution for networked consumer electronics platforms and network printers, bar-code scanners, and point-of-sales terminals. Moreover, its extended-temperature-range version (-40 to +85°C) is available to cover a wide variety of applications."
The SH7764 microprocessor can support standard operating systems such as embedded Linux and WindowsCE for development of feature-rich platforms. While these operating systems can help reduce development time and cost, it is often at the expense of performance in embedded platforms. The SH7764 microprocessor can eliminate this problem by delivering superior performance of 583 MIPS, while saving time and resources when used together with these advanced operating systems.
To speed up software processing, the SH7764's SH-4A CPU core has a large-capacity cache memory (32 Kbytes each for instructions and data), an on-chip 16-Kbyte RAM, and a 108MHz 32/64-bit bus for connections to external high-speed SDRAM. An on-chip floating-point processing unit (FPU) supports single- and double-precision arithmetic operations, achieves 2.3 GFLOPS (giga floating-point operations per second) maximum computational performance at single precision, and provides hardware support of sine/cosine operations and vector arithmetic operations for fast 3D graphics drawing. Using the FPU multimedia or other processing reduces the CPU load, allowing multiple applications to run simultaneously.
On-chip peripherals for implementing storage functions include the ATAPI controller, a NAND flash controller, and a memory card controller. Support for communication functions is provided by the Ethernet controller and USB interface, a serial communication interface with FIFO (first-in-first-out), and an I2C bus interface. On-chip display functions comprise the 2D graphics engine for screen drawing and the LCD controller and a digital RGB output function for display purposes. Other built-in functions are a serial sound interface (SSI) for digital audio playback, 32-bit timer, watchdog timer (WDT), and DMA controller (DMAC).
The SH7764 provides on-chip-debugging functions that allow real-time debugging at the device's 324MHz maximum operating frequency. The E10A-USB on-chip debugging emulator is available as a development environment, and SH7764 system development can be carried out efficiently using the high-performance user debug interface (HUDI) and advanced user debug (AUD) functions. The High-performance Embedded Workshop software package includes a comprehensive suite of software tools and offers project management capability.
SOURCE: Renesas Technology Corp.