Renesas Releases SuperH Family MCU for Automotive Engine, Transmission Applications

July 15, 2008 // Published as a news service by IHS

This MCU features operation of up to 200 MHz and a 2.5 MB on-chip flash memory.

Sample shipment began July 8, 2008, in Japan.

Renesas said the SH72544R is the first mass-production version based on the SH72546RFCC software development MCU and is fully compatible with the SH72546RFCC's functions, package and pin assignment.

This means that users can use the system hardware, programs and other design assets they developed using the SH72546RFCC.

The SH72544R can operate at high-temperature environments of ambient temperatures up to 125 degrees Celsius.

The SH72544R provides the following features:

• Central processing unit (CPU) core operating at 200 MHz can implement high-level real-time control with low power consumption. This product incorporates the same SH-2A CPU core as the SH72546RFCC, a core that adopts a superscalar design and Harvard architecture and achieves 400 million instructions per second (MIPS) at 200 MHz operation. This performance allows the SH72544R to implement even finer-grained high-level real-time control of engine and transmission systems, Renesas said.

  Despite providing a large-capacity on-chip flash memory made possible by fabrication in a 90 nanometer (nm) process, the SH72544R achieves low power consumption of less than 900 mW even when operating at 200 MHz in an environmental temperature of 125 degrees Celsius found in engines and transmissions, according to the company.

• 2.5 MB on-chip flash memory supports large-scale applications. This capacity is 2.5 times of that provided by the existing Renesas SH7058 product. In addition, the SH72544R includes 128 KB of flash memory with functions essentially equivalent to those of electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) for data storage.

  Using this on-chip flash memory can obviate the need for external memory and contribute to reduced system costs, Renesas said. The SH72544R also features a low-power cache system to optimize the use of flash memory.

• Set of peripheral functions designed for engine and transmission control systems. In addition to a multifunction timer - advanced timer unit III (ATU-III) - which can be used for both engine and transmission control, the SH72544R also features a 12 b analog-to-digital converter (ADC), controller area network (CAN) interface and high-speed serial interface functions. According to Renesas, the SH72544R can implement high-precision real-time control in a small mounting area.

• Compatibility with the SH72546RFCC. The SH72544R is fully compatible, in both functions and package, with the SH72546RFCC, which is designed for software development. The SH72546RFCC includes a large-capacity emulation random access memory (RAM) for debugging and makes possible real-time adjustment of control parameters in the application program during MCU operation. Renesas said users can develop application systems using the SH72546RFCC and then switch to end product for mass production by replacing it with the SH72544R.

The SH72544R is provided in a 272 pin plastic ball grid array (PBGA) package measuring 21 millimeters by 21 millimeters and is pin compatible with the SH72546RFCC. The E10A-USB compact on-chip debugging emulator, which is powered from the universal serial bus (USB) and requires no external power supply, can be used as a development tool.

Source: Renesas Technology Corp.