HL3.AUG–Hitachi America, Ltd.–RM
Microcontrollers aim at personal digital assistants
32/16-bit chips compete with Hobbit and ARM for the non-DOS handheld
computer market
The SH7000 series of microcontrollers have a load-store architecture with
16-bit fixed-length instructions, sixteen 32-bit general registers, 56
instructions and 11 addressing modes, and a 24-bit internal address space.
The series is aimed at personal digital assistants and portable devices
that don't require an existing instruction set.
The first parts in the series are the one-time-programmable SH7034 and
the ROMless SH7032. These parts have a five-stage pipeline, a 16-bit data
port multiplexed with address lines, and many of the expected peripheral
functions for a microcontroller (see diagram). In addition to the
RISC-like general-register operation, there is a multiply accumulate
operation that takes 16 x 16 operands and accumulates 42 bits. This
operation takes two to three clock cycles, while most other instructions
take a single clock cycle. The ROMless 7032 has 8 Kbytes of on-chip RAM.
The 7034 has 4 Kbytes of RAM and 64 Kbytes of one-time-programmable ROM.
Either can access external static or dynamic RAM without glue logic.
Running at 16 MHz (the maximum is 20), the controllers can access 70-ns
DRAM in one cycle, using page mode. Hitachi offers an evaluation board,
emulator, C compiler, and source-level debugger for the SH7000 family. The
GNU suite of tools will be ported and will be available for the PC in the
fourth quarter. The parts come in a 112-pin plastic quad flatpack. (SH7032,
$33 ea/25,000; SH7034, $41 ea/25,000–samples now.) Hitachi America, Ltd.
Brisbane, CA Information 800-285-1601, ext. 27
CAPTION:
The SH7032/4 embedded controllers bring digital signal processing and
load-store operations to the handheld PDA market.
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