San Jose, CA; Microprocessor Forum — (press release excerpt) — Hitachi Semiconductor America Inc. has announced the lastest entry to the SH family of RISC processors. It is the 32-bit SH7058F microcontroller, a 32-bit RISC MCU that runs at 80 MHz, can perform 104 million instructions per second (MIPS), and is equipped with 1 MB of on-chip Flash memory.

Hitachi is aiming the MCU at advanced embedded control systems applications for automotive, factory automation and industrial equipment.

The SH7058F is an F-ZTAT (Flexible Zero Turn-Around Time) device, a successor to the popular SH7055F MCU, which also has an SH-2E CPU core. However, the new chip offers twice the operating speed, twice the on-chip flash memory capacity and 50 percent more RAM: 48Kilobytes (KB). The single-voltage programmable 1MB flash is single-cycle accessible. On-chip write/erase firmware eliminates the need for the flash write/erase program previously provided by the user. Besides the conventional write/erase modes, the SH7058F has a user boot mode. In this mode engineers can write a custom program for the boot operation that occurs when the system is powered on. They can also use the user boot mode to implement special write/erase routines.

For improved system reliability, the SH7058F has a new oscillator halt detection function not provided in the SH7055F. When enabled, this function ensures that a back-up on-chip oscillator automatically starts up when the main clock oscillator stops or begins to function abnormally. Thus, if the main clock circuit's external crystal resonator becomes detached, the system will not crash. Instead, the back-up oscillator takes over to allow the MCU to execute software that halts system operation in an orderly manner.

The SH7058F's extensive suite of built-in peripheral functions allows engineers to build high-functionality embedded systems with fewer chips for cost and space savings. The MCU provides many timers: a watchdog timer (WDT) that can be used as an interval timer, two compare-match timer (CMT) channels, and an advanced timer unit-II (ATU-II) that comprises ten free-running counters, 16 down-counters, eight pulse width modulation (PWM) counters and six event counters. A 10-bit resolution A/D converter achieves a conversion precision of +/- 2LSB. With 32 input channels, it can be used to process a large number of analog signals carrying sensor information and the like. For efficient sensor information acquisition with precise timing, a multi-trigger A/D function initiates conversion upon receiving a signal from its own compare-match timer. A floating point unit (FPU) and multiplier accelerate mathematical computations.

For fast data communication in automotive applications and other network systems with multiple processors and peripheral devices, the SH7058F has two Hitachi controller area network II (HCAN-II) channels that are compliant with the Bosch CAN Ver. 2.0B active specification. Each channel can use 32 message buffers, 31 of which can be set for transmission or reception and one that's reserved for reception only. The HCAN-II function uses an independent 16-bit timer, so it offers a time-trigger transmission function for achieving high-speed, highly reliable communication.

 
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