SH7203 microcontroller now supported by µClinux BSP

17th July 2007

Renesas

ES Admin

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Renesas Technology Europe and Platinum Alliance partner MPC Data Limited, announce the availability of their µCLinux board support package (BSP) and tool chain for Renesas’ SH-2A-based microcontroller, the SH7203. The µCLinux BSP is fully compliant with Renesas’ RSK7203plus development board, and includes the drivers for the peripherals integrated in the SH7203. This allows developers to target a wide variety of applications requiring connectivity, TFT-drive and hundreds of MIPS performance. Increasingly, designers are being faced with these challenges when industrial PC applications have to use lower power, meet reduced cost budgets and occupy less space. The BSP covers man machine interface (MMI) features, communications and storage functions. Also included are versions of Binutils and BusyBox utility applications. These combine tiny versions of common Linux utilities in a single small executable file.

µCLinux, a version of the popular Linux kernel, is intended for microcontrollers without memory management units (MMU). It has a small memory footprint and requires few resources. Porting µCLinux to the SH7203 allows developers to take advantage of the wealth of software available for Linux. Most applications can be directly compiled on μClinux, or can be made to work with only some minor porting or adaptation.
Says Joachim Hüpper, Marketing Manager, Consumer-Industrial Business Unit, Renesas, “We are pleased to complement our high-quality and very fast SH-2A family of microcontrollers with µCLinux. The combination of the RSK7203plus development board and the new µCLinux BSP gives developer a good out-of-the –box experience when using the SH-2A family.”
“With the increasing popularity of Linux in embedded applications, and the increased performance of embedded microcontrollers, this highly stable, proven μClinux BSP gives SH-2A application developers a great starting platform to take forward Linux applications into product development and production” added Phil Buckley, MPC Data’s Linux Embedded Business Group Director.
Renesas’ SH-2A family features a superscalar RISC CPU core with harvard architecture and versions with IEEE-compliant floating point unit (FPU). Register banks enable extremely fast interrupt response in as little as 30ns. CPU performance is as high as 480 Dhrystone MIPS and peripherals within the family include up to 8 x serial, 4 x IIC, SPI, SSI, CAN, USB (Host/Function), TFT drive as well as strong timers with AC motor modes and 12bit ADC’s with 3x S&H to name just some examples.