Renesas addresses burgeoning graphics market

Robert Kalman, marketing engineer with the company's CID business unit, said: "The market for HMI applications is growing hugely and not just in the typical applications such as hand held devices and dashboards. White goods demand is also growing as manufacturers not only look to differentiate themselves, but also to provide good user interfaces." The SH7262 and SH7264 include a 144MHz superscalar cpu core achieving more than345DMIPS, along with a floating point unit. In addition to 1Mbyte of internal sram, the device also contains 64kbyte of user ram for data manipulation and 16kbyte of cache memory. Both parts also support up to 1Mbyte of on chip sram, removing the need for external memory other than flash and reducing overall system cost and power consumption. The video display controller, which includes hardware support for alpha blending and chromakeying, can drive tft screens of up to vga size. Communications features include eight uart channels, three i2c channels, two CAN*2 channels and a high speed USB peripheral. A further benefit of the part is that the external flash memory can be serial, rather than parallel. Kalman noted: "Because of the on board sram, code can run directly. Older applicatoins would have needed external flash on a 32bit bus. A serial flash interface reduces the cost of the part by about 50%." Lower pin count means the device can be supplied in a qfp, rather than a bga. This, in turn, means designers can use smaller pcbs with fewer layers.