Product category:
Microprocessors, Microcontrollers and DSPs
News Release from: Toshiba Electronics Europe | Subject: Capricorn-M and Capricorn-L
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 16 February 2006
Automotive display controllers boast
64bit cores
Two new single-chip solutions control colour graphics displays in new and emerging hybrid and solid-state vehicle instrument clusters.
Toshiba Electronics Europe (TEE) has launched two new single-chip solutions for the control of colour graphics displays in new and emerging hybrid and solid-state vehicle instrument clusters and centre consoles The new Capricorn-M and Capricorn-L ICs integrate in a single chip a powerful 64bit processor, a floating point unit (FPU), an advanced graphical display controller with dedicated accelerator functions, and a comprehensive range of onboard peripherals and interfaces
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 8 Nov 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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The high levels of integrated functionality provided by the RISC-based Capricorn-M and Capricorn-L processors allow designers to reduce component count and lower system cost.
Reduced component count also enhances the reliability of the display application, and the subsequent reduction in external connections improves overall EMC performance.
Supplied in a P-BGA456 package and operating at 240MHz, the Capricorn-M is targeted at high-end instrument cluster and centre console display applications.
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Capricorn-L, which offers the same functionality as Capricorn-M and is targeted at highly cost-sensitive display applications, is supplied in a smaller P-FBGA289 package and operates at 120MHz.
Each device combines Toshiba's TX49/H3 64bit CPU core with graphical processing functions, a quadbus DDR-SDRAM controller, and onboard peripherals and interface blocks.
Separate buses for video, graphics and MCU functions ensure optimised processing of all key functions simultaneously.
Toshiba's low-power, high-performance TX49/H3 core is based around the 64bit MIPS instruction set architecture (ISA).
The core includes 16Kbyte of instruction cache and 16Kbyte of data cache, and features a completely integrated single-/double-precision FPU coprocessor unit complying with IEEE754.
The Capricorn-M/L graphics processing and display control capabilities are delivered by the integrated GDC graphics accelerator unit.
The GDC is designed for automotive displays with resolutions from standard VGA range to very wide custom displays supporting more than 2000 pixels horizontally.
It provides up to 24bit true-colour formats with a five-layer output model comprising four main layers and the cursor layer.
The graphics accelerator enhances the display output through several handling functions, providing the very high quality anti-aliasing functions needed to ensure smooth display of moving graphics such as arrows and instrumentation pointers.
A frame grabber capable of working with a wide variety of input data formats is available for the capture and processing of video images.
The onboard quad G-bus DDR-SDRAM controller allows up to 512Mbyte of external, shared program and data memory to be connected.
This unified memory architecture, which allows the integrated core processor to share memory with the GDC, further reduces system cost and component count by making it possible to connect just a single piece of external DDR-SDRAM.
NOR Flash and NAND Flash interfaces offer connectivity to external program memory.
The Capricorn devices provide a number of interfaces commonly demanded by automotive applications.
A TXCAN controller provides three CAN channels, and a dedicated MediaLB interface allows for connectivity with an external controller for the MOST bus.
Further connectivity includes a single-channel I2C module, a three-channel, high-speed SIO/UART with FIFO, a two-channel fast queued/FIFO-SPI (ESEI), and general-purpose I/Os.
onboard peripherals include an integrated 10bit, eight-channel ADC and 12 16bit timers - six of which offer display-synchronised PWM output - one 24bit timer, and a watchdog timer.
The Capricorn devices have been developed by Toshiba's Dusseldorf-based European LSI Design and Engineering Centre (ELDEC).
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