Budget automotive MPU boosts performance

The SH7397 32bit microprocessor is a highly integrated low-cost device for enhanced telematics products and in-vehicle information systems.

Available soon from Renesas Technology Europe, the SH7397 32bit microprocessor is a highly integrated low-cost device for enhanced telematics products and in-vehicle information systems.

The SH7397 increases processing performance by 50% compared with its predecessor the SH7760.

The SH7397 SoC incorporates a built in floating point unit (FPU) and a 300MHz, 32bit SH-4A SuperH superscalar architecture that achieves up to 540MIPS and 2.1GFLOPS.

It also includes a variety of on-chip peripheral functions and interfaces such as display, voice, LAN, and memory card functions.

As a single-chip solution SH7397 enables developers to simplify their designs and reduce overall system costs by removing the number of overall parts needed.

The SH7397's high-performance SH-4A CPU core has two separate 32Kbyte four-way set-associative cache memories - one for instructions and the other for data - to improve the cache hit rate for higher throughput.

A fast-access on-chip 16Kbyte RAM further accelerates software processing.

To meet the demand for faster external memory accesses associated with higher CPU speeds, the microprocessor has a dedicated bus for connecting to high-speed DDR-SDRAM chips.

The SH7397 incorporates a variety of peripheral functions designed to reduce product costs and the number of external parts required.

The device's colour LCD controller can be connected to a display LCD panel, and supports 800 x 600 resolution and approximately 64K display colours, facilitating the configuration of a display system.

The microprocessor also has a USB interface with a v1.1 (full speed) host controller and a v2.0 (full speed) function controller that enables connections to consumer devices such as mobile phones, portable music players and similar types of portable devices.

Other peripheral functions include a four-channel 10bit A/D convertor, real-time clock (RTC), six-channel timer (TMU), interrupt controller, and six-channel direct memory access controller (DMAC) that allows high-speed data transfers to and from memory.

A comprehensive set of interfaces is also provided.

A serial sound interface and audio codec interface allow transmission and reception of the voice and audio data essential for a hands-free function.

Memory card interfaces support popular card types such as MultiMediaCard, SD memory card, PC card, and smart card, so multimedia and other data can be exchanged and stored using the card best suited to the application.

Network interfaces are also supported through a de facto in-vehicle LAN standard CAN interface, and a gigabit Ethernet controller that can be used both as a general-purpose LAN interface and as a link for software debugging.

Other versatile on-chip peripheral functions include serial interfaces such as a serial communication interface and I2C bus interface.

The SH7397 is upward compatible with other SH-4 series microprocessors.

The device comes in a 449-pin BGA (21 x 21mm) RoHS- compliant package and is supported by Renesas' popular E10A-USB on- chip-debugger.

Samples will available in August 2006.

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