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Low-cost development kit for 480-MIPS microcontroller

32-bit RISC chip can replace industrial PCs, has Linux support package

17th july 2007 - About 6 months ago, Renesas introduced a 480-MIPs microcontroller in the Super–H family, the SH7203: now, the company has added to it with a starter-kit that includes a complete evaluation and development board; and a board support package for uCLinux. The feature set of the 7203 provides, Renesas says, similar functionality to many small industrial PCs, exceeding their performance in terms of cost, power and interrupt response time. Based on the SH2-A-FPU 32bit RISC core, the chip includes a single- and double-precision floating point unit (FPU), together with an interface set that includes double CAN 2.0B, a USB 2.0 host/function with high-speed support, hardware LCD drive up to 640x480 pixels, a 6-channel, 16-bit timer with AC motor drive modes, phase counting and sophisticated dead time handling, a compare-match-timer (CMT), a real time clock (RTC), a watchdog timer (WDT), an 8-channel 10-bit ADC, a two-channel 8 bit DAC, four fifo serial ports (SCIF), four I2C ports, two SSUs, a serial sound interface (SSI), DMA controller, a bus state controller with SDRAM support (BSC), a large number of general purpose I/O, and 80Kbytes of RAM. Renesas notes that the FPU can also be used to efficiently execute DSP-type algorithms. A superscalar Harvard architecture with twin execution units and five-stage pipelines achieves 2.4MIPS/MHz. Interrupt response is 30nsec at 200MHz. The LCD controller handles STN/TFT panels, with a range of resolutions, busses, colours, and grey scales: the company says running a quarter-VGA panel at 16-bit colour depth takes 5% of the bus capacity. The floating point unit supports advanced anti-aliasing algorithms for smooth movement on LCDs: or, it can be used for complex motor-control code.
With so many interfaces on-chip, the RSK7203plus evaluation board consists largely of connectors to pin them all out: it also has an alpha-numeric LCD panel for debug (the kit includes a separate Q-VGA panel), and an Ethernet chip. The board is a complete development environment, using the debugger supplied, along with Renesas’ C compiler, and high-performance embedded workbench (HEW) included in the software package.
A board support package for uCLinux has been developed by MPC Data: it operates entirely from a USB-stick and includes the uCLinux 2.6.17 kernel, a boot loader, drivers for serial, Ethernet, MTD, USB host and function, a framebuffer Q-VGA LCD driver, and an on-board JFFS2 flash file system. Utilities include a web server – there are web-based applications demonstrations – and the USB drive support. As with the board itself, there is a development tool chain, based on GCC 3.4.6. MPC Data is providing web-site support for the package, from where it is fully down-loadable.
The RSK7203 starter kit will be supplied by Renesas’ distribution channels at around €800: the chip itself is priced at “under €10” in volume. Earlier this year, as reported in EDN Europe (here), Renesas stated its intention of winning a significantly increased share of the 32-bit MCU market, and this announcement is part of that drive.