Microcontroller line-up from Renesas Technology

The SH7136F delivers a CPU performance of 100 Dhrystone MIPS, and is supported by zero-wait MONOS (metal-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon) embedded Flash. This generation of MONOS Flash has just 12.5ns read access time, is 100% deterministic and supports 80MHz operation. The device also has a fast and vectored interrupt response time, another important criteria for deeply embedded real-time systems. The device uses the SH-2 32-bit RISC CPU core. This has 16 general purpose registers, each 32-bit wide, and is ideal for coding in ‘C’.

The SH-2 CPU also has a Multiply-Accumulate Unit (MAC) for DSP algorithms. This, coupled with the fact that users don’t have to program or debug in assembler, means it is the perfect solution for inverter applications requiring both DSP functionality and communication or standard application software support.

The device integrates 256kbyte fast MONOS Flash and yields over 100 Dhrystone MIPS CPU performance. It has two powerful timer units (MTU2, MTU2S), each capable of driving a motor. In addition, two 12-bit ADCs meet the requirements of high-performance inverters. Each one has a very fast 1.25us conversion time and three S&H to simultaneously measure the current in all 3 phases.

The MTU2 timer unit has 6 channels of 16 bit timers. Channels 3 and 4 can generate the 3-phase PWM as needed for electrical motors. Channel 2 understands quadrature encoder feedback often used in high-performance inverters. Ports PE9 and PE11-21 of the MTU2 support 15mA (0.9Vmax) sink currents for direct opto-coupler drive. The MTU2 uses channel 5 as a dedicated dead-time control aid, so that dead times can be precisely set to achieve both prevention of dangerously high cross-currents across the power bridges and prevention of conservative dead times, which reduces efficiency. The MTU2 also has two channels for general purpose timer tasks. Next to the MTU2 peripheral is also the POE. This peripheral enables immediate hardware shutdown of the motor in case of emergency. MTU2S is a copy of channels 3, 4 and 5, so can generate a second set of 3-phase PWM to drive a second motor out of the SH7136F microcontroller.

The peripheral set also features three serial ports (SCI), one synchronous serial communications unit (SSU), one IIC channel, the popular Data Transfer Controller (DTC) to offload the CPU from data movements, a watchdog timer (WDT), a compare-match-timer (CMT) and up to 57 IO ports. Finally the device has 16Kbyte RAM.

The SH7136F line-up comes in 80pin packages and is software compatible to the SH7137 family of devices that were launched earlier this year. This new device provides both a smaller and more cost effective solution for industrial inverter manufacturers.

Samples of the SH7136F are available now in a RoHS-compliant 14x14mm 80-pin QFP package with 0.65mm pitch. The device is supported by Renesas’ E10A-debugger (JTAG) and the High-Performance Embedded Workshop (HEW) tool-chain including C Compiler, linker, editor, debugger and Renesas Flash Development Tool kit (FDT). The demonstration version of the Renesas C Compiler has a code-size limit of 256K, so that the SH7136F is supported for free.

A Renesas Starter Kit is under development and scheduled to start shipping in June 2008. This kit is a complete development platform in one package including the JTAG debugger, Integrated Development Environment and example code.