600MHz SuperH Family SH7785 now available for high-performance consumer and industrial designs

Carsten Wild, marketing engineer, Renesas Technology Europe comments, “Up until now, the SH7785 has only been available for automotive applications but we are now making the device available for use in industrial and consumer applications. A comprehensive range of software tools and board support packages are now available, helping to reduce the design time for mass-market developments.”

The SH7785 is capable of up to 600 MHz operation which, together with an integrated LCD panel controller and a PCI interface, makes it ideal for advanced industrial PCs and industrial equipment and digital home appliances. The SH-4A CPU core and the floating-point processing unit (FPU) running at 600MHz provide a processing performance of 1 GIPS (giga instructions per second) and performance levels of 4.2 GFLOPS (giga floating-point operations per second). The FPU provides hardware and software support of sine/cosine operations, accelerating the drawing process for 3D graphics required for advanced multimedia displays.

A multifunction display unit that can control overlapping display screens is integrated into the SH7785 as an LCD panel controller. With this unit, the device can support up to 260,000 colours and three SVGA, four WVGA and six 480 x 234 pixel resolution screens. Such support for screen resolution and rich colour allows for highly versatile, expressive image and video displays to be realised at low cost as the design of the display unit reduces the number of external parts required, thus reducing BOM.

In order to further support the high level of system performance, the SH7785 features a 300 MHz 32-bit dedicated bus connectable to high speed DDR2-SDRAM, providing a maximum data transfer rate of 2.4 Gbytes/second. This enables the creation of a high quality, fast display capability, using the DDR2-SDRAM as a display data buffer as well as very high system performance for compute intensive industrial control processing.

The SH7785 includes a PCI bus controller providing flexible system expansion and enabling lower system costs by the ability to use existing inexpensive standard devices such as PC peripherals. Numerous other on-chip peripheral modules are provided, including a direct memory access controller, interrupt controller, watchdog timer, an interface for connection to an audio CODEC IC, and various serial interfaces. The device uses a 436-pin BGA package measuring 19 mm × 19 mm.

For easy application development and quick evaluation of the device, Renesas Technology Europe offers two development boards. These are a fully featured System Development Kit, SDK7785, and a low cost evaluation platform, R0P7785LC, which will be available in September 2008. A comprehensive Linux Board Support Package (BSP) featuring an up to date Linux kernel, compiler and tool-chain versions as well as all drivers needed for quick start and a VxWorks 6.3 BSP are available for operating system support. Other operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows Embedded CE 6.0 or eCos, an open source royalty-free real-time operating system, are currently under development.