Renesas enhances SH-Navij car navigation SoC range

Designed for compact portable navigation systems and low-end through middle-range dashboard-mounted car-navigation systems, the device offers higher performance and improved ease of use compared with the first product in the series, and in a 17 per cent smaller package.

The SH77722 incorporates the same SuperH*1 top-end SH-4A CPU core used in existing SH-Navi*2 series products.

The 400 MHz CPU achieves a processing performance of 720 MIPS and an FPU (floating-point processing unit) performance of 2.8 GFLOPS (giga floating-point operations per second).

These high levels of processing performance allow the implementation of high-performance systems.

The instruction set is upwards-compatible with that of the SH-4.

Like the SH77721 (SH-Navij1) phase-one product, the SH77722 includes a graphics processor with 2-D and 3-D capabilities, to provide high-level drawing functions.

In addition to previous 2-D drawing functions such as bold-line drawing and anti-aliasing, it implements 3-D drawing functions such as 3-D triangle drawing and texture mapping, enabling high-quality output.

Therefore, the single drawing processor can draw an advanced map display composed of a variety of 3-D contents, such as buildings and landmarks on a map and richly expressive GUI display with heavy use of graphics functions, as well as 2-D contents such as maps, icons and menus.

Renesas Technology has also brought out a high-performance 2-D and 3-D graphics library that enables developers to extract maximum performance from the graphics processor.

This 3-D graphics library features an industry-standard interface and a user-friendly API (Application Programming Interface) that makes it easy to utilise the rendering functions supported by the graphics processor.

The 2-D graphics library conforms to the GDI-Sub*3 specifications compliant with Microsoft's Windows*4 Automotive*5 5.0 Service Pack 2.

The addition of a 32-bit bus for the DDR2 SDRAM (double data rate 2 synchronous DRAM) memory interface means the SH77722 offers increased data-transfer efficiency, allowing faster implementation of the advanced graphics functions.

A 16-bit extension bus is also provided for connection to Flash memory or SRAM.

Unified memory architecture enables memory to be shared by the various modules, making it possible to reduce the number of external memory parts.

Doubling the bus width for DDR2 SDRAM from 16 to 32-bit also makes it possible to support two-screen displays, with one screen allowed to be used for a car navigation display and the other for a rear monitor in the back of the car, for example.

One channel supports digital RGB output and the other channel includes an LVDS*6 interface, making it possible to transmit image data to a remote monitor with a minimal number of lines.

For example, the SH77722 can output graphics and other data in WXGA size (1280 x 768 pixels) for one screen and WVGA size (832 x 496 pixels) for two screens.

In-car network functionality is strengthened by the inclusion of a MOST (Media Oriented Systems Transport) interface and a second CAN*7 interface channel.

The SH77722 also incorporates other peripheral functions necessary for car information systems, including a USB 2.0 high-speed host/function interface, SD*8 card host interface, FM multiplex decoder and multiple audio and serial interfaces.

This range of peripherals helps reduce the number of component parts needed in a car navigation system and makes it possible to achieve high system performance at a lower cost.

An E10A-USB emulator connected to a host PC via a USB interface can be used as a development environment and the provision of an on-chip debugging function allows real-time debugging to be carried out at the maximum operating frequency.

Renesas is currently preparing a reference platform for user system development to be available in July 2009.