Renesas, which spun out of a joint venture between Hitachi and Mitsubishi in April, 2003, reports that 70 companies have signed up for its “SH-Mobile Consortium.” The SH-Mobile processors were developed specifically for mobile phones, according to Renesas, and the coalition will promote member products to handset… manufacturers.

A few of the 70 Consortium members include Access, Analog Devices, Intrinsyc, Mentor Graphics, MontaVista, MPC-Data, M-Systems, Nissin, PacketVideo, and Yamaha.

According to Renesas, the Consortium supports hardware, software, and mobile handset developers using the SH-Mobile architecture. It includes a wide variety of mobile technology-related companies from around the world, including middleware and software providers.

Ikuya Kawaski, a manager at Renesas, said, “All parties will benefit from the synergies that can be achieved by bringing third party software/middleware suppliers into this customer-focused consortium. Together, we offer handset makers complete solutions.”

About SH-Mobile

Renesas describes its SH-Mobile processors as follows:

SH-Mobile is a flexible application accelerator that provides multimedia support for next-generation cellular phone communications. Unlike a traditional baseband CPU method that uses a single CPU to manage both signal and application processing, the SH-Mobile design approach uses a dual CPU architecture that dedicates one CPU to application execution in order to maximize communication performance. Built on Renesas' popular SuperH 32-bit RISC superscalar architecture, SH-Mobile devices offers compelling functionality such as the JPEG, MP3, acoustic echo canceller, AMR codec, MPEG4 encode/decode and Java Virtual Machine capabilities that are essential for supporting the high-end multimedia applications of next generation mobile phones.

Renesas claims it currently sells one million SH-Mobile chips per month to 20 handset makers worldwide, with a three-fold increase in volume expected by April, 2006.

 
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