Product and News Information

Having completed the design of a new CPU architecture, Renesas has chosen "RX" as the new family name for products that use the CPU. "RX" is an abbreviation of "Renesas eXtreme" and means "products with distinctive performance that are easy to use." The RX family of 16-bit and 32-bit CISC microcomputers now under development will use the new CPU to support customers' needs for capability upgrades, while also enabling new embedded system applications, thereby expanding our global microcomputer business.

The RX architecture is engineered to meet the following five objectives:

Our long-term business strategy is to integrate the current Renesas CISC microcomputers into the RX range and adopt architectures that can satisfy these objectives. The fast, high-throughput RX CPU architecture will be manufactured with a 90nm process. It obtains improved code efficiency through the use of new three-operand instructions, in addition to the two-operand instructions currently used. Power saving circuit technology provides substantial reductions in power consumption. New system development tools are being produced to facilitate compatibility and help customers to port resources created for designs utilizing our existing microcomputers to products in the RX family.

With the release of the SH-MobileR2 (product name: SH7723), Renesas has taken another step to extend the SH-Mobile series of application processors to non-mobile phone applications. The new application processor is aimed primarily at advanced personal navigation devices (PNDs) and car navigation systems that support MobileTV(ISDB-T,T-DMB,DVB-H,etc) .

Built on the SH-4A CPU core, the SH-MobileR2 chip includes a floating-point unit (FPU) useful for functions such as image and sound processing. The device's maximum operating frequency of 400MHz is one and a half times faster than the previous model. The resulting processing performance at that frequency is 720MIPS (Dhrystone benchmark), and the FPU is capable of 2.8GFLOPS performance.

Features of the new application processor include the VPU5F video processing IP, a 2D graphics accelerator for enhanced performance, and an enlarged edge-enhancement function for high-quality display of terrestrial digital broadcasts.

The range of low-end models in the H8S series of high-performance 16-bit microcomputers expands with the introduction of the 24 devices in the three product groups of the H8S/Tiny series. Devices in the series, such as the 64-pin H8S/20103 and 80-pin H8S/20203 and H8S/20223 provide a number of functions that appear in Renesas models for the first time. These include an event link controller, which reduces the processing load on the CPU during interrupt handling, and a peripheral I/O mapping controller, which can select seven different pin function combinations for pins other than the system control and analog pins.

Two more on-chip peripheral functions are also available: a highly precise PWM control function and a high-speed on-chip oscillator that can select an accurate frequency of either 40MHz or 32MHz.

The R2A20051NS charging-control IC includes almost all of the protection functions required for safely charging the lithium ion batteries used in digital still camera and similar products. In addition to two timers for monitoring charging time, it provides functions for adapter detection, over-discharge, over-voltage, and temperature protection.

The device is the smallest charging-control IC in the industry, having external dimensions of only 2.7mm x 2.5mm. It uses a compact 10-pin SON package because its design has eliminated pins that don't have a high degree of versatility. Despite the fact that the R2A20051NS incorporates the FET switch used for charging, the IC has a mounting footprint approximately one quarter the size of the previous Renesas model.

A new Renesas LCD controller/driver for mobile phones and other portable devices is a single-chip solution for use in amorphous TFT color-LCD modules for wide-QVGA (WQVGA: 240 x 432 pixels) screens. The R61517 supports approximately 260,000-color display on screen sizes up to WQVGA (240 x 432 pixels). (WQVGA screens have an aspect ratio of 16:9, which is suitable for displaying mobile-TV programs.)

The IC has a backlight control (BLC) function and can reduce the power consumption of the LCD module by approximately 30% compared to the previous Renesas LCD controller/driver. The R61517 uses the MIPI interface to connect to the embedded system's microcomputer.