Multi-core technology key to reversing economic doldrums
18 May 2009
With electronic companies struggling to stay afloat in the current economic crisis, EPD spoke to tech giant Renesas to discuss what the company is doing to reverse the current industry doldrums. Created in 2003 as a joint venture between Hitachi and Mitsubishi, Renesas has emerged as the market leader in microcontrollers with sub-markets in IC cards, mixed-signal devices, discrete devices, RF ICs, memory and LCD drivers. The financial crisis has created problems for every industry, Renesas believes this is the time to position themselves so that when the market recovers, they have the right products to ensure success. Robert Kalman, Marketing Engineer at the Consumer and Industrial Business Unit of Renesas, said, “A lot of our customers are using this downturn to be innovative either by cost-reductions or by differentiating themselves from their competitors. Renesas is supporting that innovation.”
This support comes in the form of dual-core technology known as Super-H squared. The Super-H processor core family is fundamentally based on a 32-bit RISC architecture originally developed by Hitachi in the ‘90s. The SH-2A, an extension of the SH-2, signified the move to superscalar (two instructions per cycle) architecture, albeit without an MMU, but with advantages such as fast response time and support for μCLinux. The SH-4A, with an MMU, targeted high performance applications through open OS support. Launching the SuperH squared is the SH7205 featuring two SH-2A cores in parallel thereby performing almost 1000 MIPS. Further on in 2009, Renesas also expect to launch the SH7786 which has two SH-4A cores “delivering very high floating point performance and high integration in competition with e.g. Atom.” Explaining why Renesas is keen to pursue multicore architecture, Kalman said, “customers need to do more and more things in parallel, for example, in a factory automation system, you can drive the system with one MCU while the second MCU can focus on a GUI for the human-machine interface; lots of our customers want to combine those two applications into one.”
Carsten Wild, Marketing Engineer for the SH Processors, also part of the CID Business Unit at Renesas, added that the company needs to continue their focus on key growth areas, especially Graphical User Interfaces. “There has been a large price decrease in display technology with lots of applications and products having high-end displays,” said Wild. As the cost of LCD screens has come down significantly, Renesas predicts that previously “graphic-less” applications are now being fitted with increasingly complex GUIs. One of the key trends in the market will be the introduction of audio and video features to white goods, for example adding touch screen support and high-end UI such as in the iPhone to consumer and white goods. Renesas offers up the SuperH range for GUI solutions based on intelligent accelerators, integrated SRAM, image recognition hardware support, camera interfaces etc. all at low power. The SH7264 will be an integration of 1 MB of SRAM for graphical applications with the SH-2A. “Customers have an inherent risk when buying external SRAM, for example, with certain companies becoming insolvent. In the current climate, the SH7264 allows customers to decouple from the risky market,” said Kalman. To increase take-up of their technology, Renesas has launched Little Blue Linux, a live CD that automatically boots up a μCLinux development environment. “This is a new development for white goods manufacturers who don’t have Linux expertise, we have seen a huge increase in case of use with its introduction,” Kalman added.
Additionally, the SH772x family will focus on high-end devices such as video conferencing systems. These will come with software support such as DirectFB, which is a collection of standard 2DG APIs, and Qtopia by Trolltech/Nokia and is optimised for SH-4 architecture. “Selling a chip is very hard without software support,” commented Wild. The Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 ports to the Renesas SH7723 platform under Linux to cut development time for building flashy GUIs. An advantage Renesas is quick to point out is that “instead of using JAVA or C interfaces, graphics designers will be able to use Adobe professional tools to create GUIs, download them on to our embedded systems and have it running immediately”.
Finally, an important aspect that Renesas will be focussing on in the future is to maintain their market share in key areas. Renesas’ current market share in industrial motor control is 50%. “Although we have several new products – from low to high end – we need to continue to focus on our key growth areas to position ourselves in market recovery,” said Wild.
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