San Jose, Calif. — Renesas Technology America, Inc. has unveiled the SH-MobileR2, the latest member in the SH-Mobile series of application processors for portable multimedia systems, at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC). The SH7723 device enables the design of portable and mobile devices with multimedia capabilities including personal navigation devices (PNDs), portable media players and video and voice over IP (V2IP) terminals.
The SH7723 multimedia processor is the first device in the SH-Mobile series designed for low-power multimedia systems. The SH-MobileR2 operates about 1.5 times as fast as the first generation and delivers higher levels of processing performance in encoding and decoding audio and visual data, Renesas said.
The SH-MobileR2 incorporates the SH-4A CPU core that operates at up to 400 MHz and has a floating-point processing unit (FPU) that increases the efficiency of video and audio processing. At 400 MHz, processing performance is 720 MIPS (million instructions per second), and FPU performance is 2.8 GFLOPS (giga floating-point operations per second). This is more than sufficient to handle parallel processing of multiple applications or general-purpose operating systems such as Windows CE or Linux, which impose significant processing loads, Renesas said.
In addition, the SH-MobileR2's 64 Kbyte primary cache memory (32 Kbytes each for instructions and data) is supplemented by a new 256 Kbyte secondary cache memory (mixed instructions and data) that contributes to faster software execution.
The application processor incorporates a host of on-chip peripherals, including a VPU5F (Video Processing Unit 5F) multi-CODEC video processing function, an IP block that achieves high performance with low power consumption. The VPU5F supports the H.264/MPEG-4 video compression standard used in Internet streaming applications and can perform VGA-size encoding and decoding at a rate of 30 frames per second (fps). It also supports MPEG-4 encoding and decoding and VC-1 decoding, making it possible to implement video e-mail, videophone, and video capture applications.
The SH-MobileR2's 2-D graphics accelerator provides enhanced functionality and performance for faster, better-quality map rendering. Other peripheral functions include USB 2.0 host/function support (high-speed), an ATAPI controller allowing connection to a hard disk or DVD drive, and an SD host controller with high-speed capability.
The peripheral functions built into the new application processor make it possible to reduce the total number of parts for multimedia products and reduce system cost, while maintaining high-level performance, said Renesas. A variety of middleware products are available for the device, including video middleware supporting H.264, MPEG-4, and WMV and audio middleware supporting aacPlus (Advanced Audio Coding Plus).
Pricing: Available now, the R8A77230C400BG part (-20° to 70°C operating temperature) is priced at $26 and the R8A77230D400BG (-40° to 85°C operating temperature) is priced at $30.
Product information: SH7723
Renesas Technology Corp. www.renesas.com
