SuperH, Inc., Announces First SH-5 Core Now Available for Licensing; Digital Consumer and Automotive Applications Benefit from Low Power, High Code Density Processor

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb 25, 2002 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- SuperH, Inc., a world leader in embedded RISC microprocessor technology, today announced that the first member of the SH-5 family, the SH5-100 series core is now available for licensing globally.

SuperH, Inc., is an independent company formed by Hitachi Ltd. and ST Microelectronics, to make the SuperH(TM)architecture available to the open market. The SH-5 core is the first new product from SuperH, Inc., since it was formed in 2001.

Based on the popular SuperH family of RISC-based embedded processors, the SH5-100 series is the first 64-bit CPU core with a floating point unit (FPU), single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) instructions and on-chip debug capabilities. Ideally suited for system-on-chip (SOC) designs and embedded applications, SH-5 provides a feature-rich platform for designers developing set-top boxes, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications, graphics, games and car infotainment systems. The core also offers backward compatibility with earlier SuperH processors allowing customers to preserve their software investments.

The SH-5 is available for licensing now as a hard or soft core along with various software and development tools. A range of design licenses are available from perpetual to single-use, providing a variety of solutions to meet the needs of both designers and service providers. In addition, agency and manufacturing licenses are available for customers and foundries providing design and fabrication services.

"We've made it easy for customers to secure the right type of license to meet their development needs and ramp quickly to production," said Rick Chapman, vice president of marketing and sales. "We also provide all of the tools and design help they may need, he added. We believe the SH-5 will be an ideal solution for the proliferation of convergence applications providing an optimal balance between price, power and performance."

The SH-5 is a 64-bit RISC design that delivers in excess of 700 MIPs at 400MHz, while consuming less than 400mW. It was designed for highly complex and interactive media applications, running on advanced operating systems such as Windows CE, VxWorks, Linux, QNX, Nucleus+, OS-9, JavaOS, and others.
SH5-100 Series Features Powerful Vector FPU for 3-D Graphics

The detachable IEEE-754 single and double precision FPU is a co-processor contained within the general core and executes floating point operations more quickly than the basic microprocessor. It has separate floating point registers that may be configured as 64 single precision, 32 double precision or 16 single precision vector registers. The FPU performs up to 4 multiply and 3 addition operations every clock cycle, achieving 2.8GFLOPs at 400MHz.

Multimedia Applications Benefit From SH-5 8-Way SIMD

The SIMD core instructions operate on three operands, each of which may have eight 8-bit, four 16-bit or two 32-bit values. This is especially productive for applications in which visual images or audio data need to be processed such as in games and multimedia applications. Throughput can be sustained up to 9.6 GOPS delivering leading edge multimedia processing capability on a range of video and audio applications.
Dual Mode Operation Can Be Switched On-the-Fly SHmedia

SHmedia mode is a complete 32-bit encoded fixed length instruction set that delivers excellent multimedia performance with integer, packed arithmetic/SIMD and floating point operations. It is used for real-time applications where performance is at a premium.

SHcompact

The SHcompact mode is a complete, rich 16-bit encoded fixed length instruction set that is compatible with previous generations of the SuperH architecture allowing legacy code to run on the SH-5 core. SHcompact mode, as the name implies, results in higher code density, and therefore a smaller memory footprint. The SH-5 core can switch between SHmedia mode and SHcompact mode dynamically on a branch instruction allowing users to selectively optimize portions of code for performance or memory footprint.

SuperHyway(TM) Bus Solves Problems of System-On-Chip Designs

The SuperHyway system provides an on-chip interconnection solution that can be optimized for different cost/performance implementations. A VSI compliant bus, the SuperHyway in its simplest form can be a single 8 to 64-bit wide bus for basic peripherals. For high performance direct routing, a crossbar can be incorporated, while split transactions, out of order execution and full pipelined access can also be enabled according to system needs. For the most complex systems, the SuperHyway bus supports a memory-mapped, packet-based split transaction protocol and achieves 3.2GBs bandwidth when operating at 200MHz.

On-Chip Tools Make Debugging Easier

Debugging chips integrated into a complex system design is a difficult task without actually removing the chip and probing the pins; debugging highly embedded CPU cores in an SoC is doubly difficult. SH-5 solves this problem with the SHdebug(TM) link. This on-chip module and associated software tool chain allows engineers to non-intrusively analyze system behavior inside their SoC design. They can trace execution flow, set watch points and monitor on-chip SuperHyway traffic. The debug capability is also useful for end-product system service and support needs.

Licensing Information

For information on licensing the SH-5 core, send an email to: info@superh.com.

Additional information on SH products can be found at www.superh.com.

About SuperH, Inc.,

SuperH, Inc., was established as an independent company in 2001 following an agreement between STMicroelectronics and Hitachi to create an independently managed entity to develop processor cores for the open market.

This release of the SH5-100 series core expands the portfolio of licensable IP offered by SuperH, Inc., which also includes the high-performance, low-cost power efficient SH-4 core, targeted at the next generation digital consumer, automotive and telecommunications applications. In the future, SuperH, Inc. will develop all subsequent SuperH cores to the open market, including the development of the SH-6 and SH-7 cores.

The SuperH family of high-performance 32-bit and 64-bit RISC-based processor cores is ideally suited for applications that require a highly integrated system-on-chip solution that includes a powerful embedded processing engine and can run a wide variety of application software on industry-standard operating systems and middleware. SuperH processors are used in many products including digital consumer devices such as set-top boxes, digital cameras and gaming platforms; and factory automation and car information systems. Further information about SuperH products can be found on www.superh.com.