San Jose, CA — (press release excerpt) — Hitachi Semiconductor (America) Inc. today announced the 32-bit RISC/DSP SH7727 microprocessor, a fast 160-megahertz (MHz), highly integrated SupErH-series processor with extensive integration that will simplify the design of many consumer and industrial embedded system products. The SH7727 device's extensive on-chip peripherals include a Universal Serial Bus (USB) Host controller, a USB Function controller, and a color LCD controller.

The SH7727 RISC/DSP (digital signal processing) chip will enable system engineers to create smaller, lower-cost designs for consumer, commercial and industrial products. Products include handheld and Pocket PCs, PDA devices, printer/copier/fax machines, data storage devices, wireless LAN products, communication network devices for voice and data services, portable information terminals, video printers, Point-of-Sale terminals and digital still and video cameras.

The USB Host and USB Function on the SH7727 processor comply with the USB Standard, Rev. 1.1. The USB Host implementation supports isochronous interrupt, control, and bulk transfer, allowing a maximum data transfer speed of 12 million-bits-per-second (Mbps). The host implementation also complies with the Open Host Controller Interface (OpenHCI) specifications to facilitate porting device driver software from PC driver software. The USB Function in the SH7727 processor supports interrupt, control, and bulk transfer. It includes a signal transceiver, eliminating the need for external components such as buffers.

The color LCD controller in the SH7727 processor supports technologies for liquid display panels such as STN, DSTN, and TFT. The internal memory used for storing display image data employs a Unified Memory Access (UMA) architecture, and is shared with system memory. The SH7727 microprocessor allows the display of up to 65,536 colors with a 640 x 480-dot screen size. A 2.4KB line memory buffer enables high-speed drawing of large volumes of data for fast display updates.

The SH7727 RISC/DSP processor provides a variety of other useful peripheral functions such as an interface allowing connection to an Analog Front End (AFE) integrated circuit (IC) and an interface enabling direct connection to an Audio Codec IC for music playback or to a telephony Codec IC for a software modem and internet telephony functions. The SH7727 processor also integrates an MMU, a DMA controller, memory management function, A/D and D/A converters for analog signal processing, interfaces for various kinds of memory including synchronous DRAM, IrDA Ver.1.0, and a PCMCIA controller.

A PDA reference platform based on the SH7727, with support for Linux, is available.

 
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