Renesas Technology America has introduced the 32-bit SH7397 “Euclid” microprocessor for cost-sensitive telematics applications, primarily in North America. It’s based on a 300 MHz SH-4A superscalar core said to be capable of 540 MIPS and 2.1 GFLOPS performance, and it represents the new high end of Renesas’ “compact solutions” family. Paul Sykes, product marketing manager for telematics in Renesas’ Automotive Business Unit, said the compact products offer more peripherals than are available for Renesas’ “scalable solutions,” but fewer than those in “highly integrated solutions.”
Sykes said the SH7397 is upward code-compatible with its predecessor, the 200 MHz, SH-4-based SH7760 “Camelot.” The SH-4A CPU core has two separate 32 Kbyte, four-way set-associative cache memories, one for instructions and the other for data. Sykes said the combination boosts throughput by improving the cache hit rate. On-chip, fast-access 16 Kbyte RAM also speeds processing.
Renesas’ new device features a built-in floating-point unit and offers an upgraded set of peripherals and interfaces. A dedicated bus is available for connection to external high-speed DDR-SDRAM. The chip includes a color LCD controller that can produce approximately 64,000 colors on an 800 x 600 pixel LCD panel, and a USB interface with a v1.1 host and a v2.0 function controller. The controller enables connections to mobile phones, portable music players and other consumer devices.
Other peripherals include a four-channel 10-bit A/D converter, real-time clock (RTC), six-channel timer (TMU), interrupt controller, and six-channel direct memory access controller (DMAC) for high-speed data transfers to and from memory.
The SH7397 has a serial sound interface and an audio CODEC interface for transmission/reception of voice and audio data in hands-free applications. Memory card interfaces support MultiMediaCard, SD memory card, PC card, and smart card for exchange and storage of multimedia and other data. The chip includes a CAN interface, and an Ethernet controller that can be used as a general-purpose LAN interface and as a link for software debugging. It also has a three-channel serial communication interface with FIFO (SCIF), a three-channel serial I/O with FIFO (SIOF), and a two-channel I2C bus interface.
Packaged in a 449-pin, 21 mm x21 mm BGA, the SH7397 is supported by a modular, automotive-grade hardware reference platform, "Sequoia," which provides external memory; debug ports; peripheral functions for audio, display, and CAN; USB, PCMCIA, MMC, smart card, SD memory/IO card and Ethernet interfaces, and support for real-time operating systems (VxWorks, WindowsCE and embedded Linux) and middleware. QNX Software said it will add support for Sequoia automotive platform to the QNX Neutrino RTOS.
Sykes said developers can leverage SH-4A-compatible technology from various software developers to accelerate application development. He noted, “Sequoia's expandable baseboard supports numerous peripherals and optional expansion interfaces for modules, including Bluetooth, GPS or user-defined functions.”