Renesas Expands Its SuperH Family of Products

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Renesas Technology America has announced the SH7730 group: three 32-bit microprocessors for use in a wide range of multimedia applications, such as digital consumer products and industrial equipment. The devices strengthen the company's line of SuperH RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) solutions that incorporate the fast SH-4A superscalar CPU core. The microprocessors in the SH7730 group are the successors to the devices in Renesas' SH7709S group. The new devices replace the SH-3 CPU core used in previous-generation devices with a top-end, upward-compatible SH-4A CPU core based on a superscalar architecture that enables faster application performance. Also, they use an environment-friendly lead-free 208-pin QFP package that allows product designs to be built with lower-cost circuit boards such as 4-layer types.

The SH-4A CPU delivers processing performance of 480 MIPS (million instructions per second) at 266MHz clock speeds — an approximately 1.8-fold improvement over SH7709S devices — and achieves a low power consumption level of 0.6mA/MHz. The devices have large-capacity on-chip cache memories (32Kbytes each for instructions and data) and RAM (16Kbytes) for accelerating software processing speeds. The devices' on-chip floating point unit and memory management unit also allow fast execution of arithmetic processing of screen graphics and communication/multimedia protocols. The SH-4A CPU is upward compatible with the SH-3 CPU so that existing software resources can be repurposed to save system development time and expense.

Many on-chip peripheral functions are provided by the microprocessors in the SH7730 group. There are up to six serial interface channels with a built-in FIFO (first-in, first-out) buffer, up to fourteen 32-bit or 16-bit timer channels, and a 6-channel DMA (direct memory access) controller, as well as a 4-channel 10-bit A/D converter and 2-channel 10-bit D/A converter. Additionally, the devices provide a variety of timers and an I2C interface. The built-in 66MHz SDRAM (synchronous DRAM) interface bus frequency is the same as the one for SH7709S devices, which simplifies board bus design and allows the reuse of existing external memory implementations. The devices' have an on-chip debugging function which enables real-time debugging at the maximum operating frequency.

To aid system development, Renesas offers a complete suite of development tools designed specially for the SH7730 devices. The E10A-USB on-chip debugging emulator is available as a development environment, and system development can be carried out efficiently using the high-performance user debug interface and advanced user debug functions. The Embedded Workshop software package includes a suite of software tools and offers project management capability.

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