Tokyo and Santa Clara, CA — (press release excerpt) — NEC Corporation and its wholly owned semiconductor affiliate in the United States, NEC Electronics Inc., today introduced the VR4181A 64-bit microprocessor, the latest addition to NEC's VR family of processors designed to provide low-power operation with high integration. The microprocessor integrates more than 18 peripherals and interfaces with a powerful VR4120A processor core. As a result, this processor provides a unique system-on-a-chip (SoC) solution for portable devices, industrial applications, automotive communications, and telematics applications. Support is available for operating the VR4181A under Linux as well as several other popular embedded operating systems.

Summary of features . . .

• Microprocessor subsystem
  • Ultra-low-power VR4120A CPU
    
  • Executes 157 Dhrystone MIPS at 131 MHz
    
  • Memory management unit
    
  • MIPS instruction sets including MIPS III (without FPU, LL, and SC instructions) and MIPS16
    
  • Direct-mapped 16 KB cache (8 KB instruction and 8 KB data caches)
    
  • Interrupt control, memory control, and direct memory access (DMA) control units
    
  • Power management unit with four modes
    
  • Real-time clock with four built-in timers
    
  • Watchdog timer
• Integrated peripherals/interfaces:
  • Multimode TFT/STN LCD controller
    
  • Touch-panel and keyboard controllers
    
  • Universal Serial Bus (USB) host and controller
    
  • Stereo audio interface
    
  • AC97-type audio codec
    
  • Three pulse-wave modulation (PWM) channels
    
  • Inter-IC sound (I2S) interface
    
  • Clocked serial interface and I2C bus interface
    
  • Analog output interface
    
  • 64 general-purpose programmable I/O lines
    
  • Three 16550-compliant UART serial channels
    
  • Fast infrared (IrDA) interface port; up to 4 Mbps
    
  • Two CompactFlash expansion interfaces
    
  • External peripheral interconnect bus (ISA subset)
• Power consumption: 500 mW or less (typical) at 131 MHz
  
• Sophisticated battery interface with low power sensing
  
• 2.5-volt core operating voltage; 3.3-volt I/O operating voltage
  
• 240-pin FPBGA package
  
• ADB-VR4181A evaluation board available

 
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