Renesas Technology released in Europe and America the SH7785, a 32-bit microprocessor with a 600MHz maximum operating frequency that sets a new speed record for the SuperH® family of microprocessors.

The device incorporates a top-end SH-4A superscalar CPU core with on-chip cache and RAM that delivers 1 GIPS (giga instructions per second) performance for fast program execution. It also has a floating-point processing unit (FPU) that achieves 4.2 GFLOPS (giga floating-point operations per second) performance. The FPU provides hardware and software support of sine/cosine operations, accelerating the drawing process for 3D graphics required for advanced multimedia displays.

The 19 mm x 19 mm SH7785 boasts a 50% increase in processing performance and functionality and is about 20 % smaller in comparison to the current SH7780.

Main applications for the SH7785 are car infotainment system (CIS) products and other multimedia systems that process 2D and 3D color graphics or require powerful processing.

The higher levels of performance and functionality of the SH7785 are necessary to handle the rapidly increasing sophistication and expanding features of the latest multimedia systems. A valuable new feature for a car navigation system is one that shows an annotated 3D picture of what the driver can see through the windshield, created based on the vehicle’s location and speed and direction of motion.

The on-chip multifunction display unit can control multiple overlapping display screens and is included in the SH7785 as an LCD panel controller. It can produce a display of up to three SVGA resolution (800 x 600) screens. It allows up to about 260,000 display colors. The display unit also offers other advanced control capabilities, such as transparency processing and overwriting of text information during streaming video playback.

Because multimedia systems with fast, high-quality displays typically use external memory for a display data buffer, the SH7785 has a 300MHz, 32-bit dedicated bus. That bus can connect to high-speed DDR2-SDRAM (Double Data Rate 2-Synchronous DRAM), providing a maximum data transfer rate of 2.4 Gigabytes/second.

Besides the LCD panel controller, a variety of peripheral functions are integrated into the SH7785 to simplify and reduce the cost of embedded multimedia systems. A hardware data translation accelerator useful for moving-image playback provides high-speed execution of motion compensation, color data format conversion, and more. Used in combination with the display unit, it enables moving-image playback and display to be performed by the SH7785 alone. A PCI bus controller enables easy, flexible system expansions that use existing inexpensive external PC peripherals. It also enables the implementation of sophisticated display functions via an external connection to a high-performance PCI-complaint device with 3D display functions.

Sample shipments will begin in May 2006.