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Mobile phone chip targets Linux camera phones

Apr 28, 2005 — by Henry Kingman — from the LinuxDevices Archive — views

Renesas will ship a processor for mid-range multimedia mobile phones this month. The SH-MobileJ3 is based on a 32-bit, 133MHz SH3/DSP core, and includes dual camera interfaces and several multimedia accelerators. It targets mid-range phones such as cameraphones with sensors up to 4 megapixels, gaming phones, and Web phones.

Renesas announced its Mobile3 line last May, claiming the chips would have twice the power of previous SH-Mobile chips — enough to run Linux and other complex embedded operating systems alongside baseband LSIs (large-scale-integrated chips) in dual-chipset designs.

The SH-MobileJ3 (part number SH7326, or R8J73260BP133) is based on an SH3-DSP core, a 32-bit single execution stream RISC/DSP core. The chip has 128KB of on-chip RAM, as well as 32KB of cache, and 16KB of X/Y memory for the DSP. The chip also has an MMU, and six DMAC channels.

The SH-MobileJ3 includes a number of multimedia accelerators, including an MPEG-4 accelerator capable of playing video at 30fps on a QVGA (320 x 240) screen, Renesas says. It also includes a JPEG accelerator said to perform compression and expansion ten times faster than middleware, while also reducing memory buffer size. A video I/O interface supports direct connection of camera modules, Renesas says.

The SH-MobileJ3 integrates an LCD controller, and can output video to PAL and NTSC TVs. An external memory interface supports up to 4GB of NAND/AND flash, up from 512MB in previous SH-Mobile chips. Additional on-chip peripherals include USB2.0, I2C, key-scan, two synchronous serial interfaces, single-channel sound I/O, memory card interface, and an IrDA interface. The chip also offers power management hardware.

Brian Davis, director of business development, said, “The SH-MobileJ3 application processor targets the mainstream mobile phone market with the right balance of cost, performance, and functionality.”

Availability

The SH-MobileJ3 will ship in May of 2005, packaged in a 281-pin CSP, priced at $32.78 in quantities of 10,000.


 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.



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