Hitachi Review Vol. 48 (1999), No. 6 309 SuperH RISC Engine and Memories for Multimedia Fumio Arakawa OVERVIEW: Recently, the market for mobile multimedia products has been Yasushi Akao growing. Low power is important for making these products more portable, allowing extended use with small, lightweight batteries. Flash memories Kiyoshi Inoue are well-suited as a storage medium for these products because of their nonvolatility and compactness, and their market is rapidly growing. The line up of the SuperH RISC engine series (SH-1, SH-2, SH2-DSP, SH-3, SH3-DSP, and SH-4) offers low-power products in a wide range of performance levels. The series covers all of the needs of mobile multimedia products because it integrates peripheral circuits, memories, and other devices, to reduce overall system cost. We released the ×64-type 256-Mbit SDRAM for the main memory in 1999. Its multichip packaging gives it high capacity and high speed in a small mounting area. Infineon Technologies and Hitachi jointly released the 16-Mbyte flash card, called the MultiMediaCard, which so far is the smallest and lightest currently available. Combined with Hitachi’s original AND type cell, this flash memory offers a high capacity and low cost. INTRODUCTION In this article, we first describe recent trends of THE consumer market for mobile multimedia products mobile multimedia consumer products; processor and such as handheld personal computers (H/PCs), digital memory specifications required by the products; and still cameras, digital video cameras, MPEG2 cameras, then describe the lineup of Hitachi’s high-performance and MP3 players has been growing recently. Mobile RISC processors, the SuperH RISC engine series, and phones, originally used just for making calls, have memory products satisfying the specification become digital and multi-functional and are evolving requirements. Fig. 1 shows the recent semiconductor into a multimedia communication tool capable of products for these applications. handling data and images as well as voice. MIPS: mega instructions per second PCI: peripheral component interconnect SDRAM: synchronous dynamic random access memory MCM: multi-chip module (b) SH7751 (d) 256-Mbit SDRAM (four 64-Mbit chips in MCM) Fig. 1—Recent Products of SuperH (a) SH7751 chip (1,000 MIPS/W, on-chip PCI controller) RISC Engine and Memories. (a) (b) SH7751 achieves 1,000 MIPS/W for high performance mobile products, (c) world’s smallest and lightest 16-Mbyte (c) 16-Mbyte MultiMediaCard (joint development with MultiMediaCard, (d)(e) 256- Infineon Technologies) (e) Inside of 256-Mbit SDRAM MbitSDRAM in MCM reduces the mounting area. SuperH RISC Engine and Memories for Multimedia 310 speeds. Smart phone Flash card and PC card type hard disks are the PDA, H/PC conventional storage media for mobile multimedia Information Car navigation products. The storage media market of the audio and visuals are expected to make rapid progress, which Still image Digital still camera requires a large capacity. Further enhancement of the media capacity is necessary to record video. Digital video camera Video MPEG1 camera LINEUP AND APPLICATIONS OF SuperH MPEG4 camera RISC ENGINE Audio MP3 player Lineup The SuperH RISC engine series consists of a micro- 19901995 2000 controller unit (MCU) lineup and a microprocessing PDA : personal digital assistant unit (MPU) lineup. The MCU products are SH-1, SH- MP3 : MPEG1 Layer3 2, and SH2-DSP, and the MPU products are SH-3, Fig. 2—Trends of Mobile Multimedia Consumer Products. SH3-DSP, and SH-4 (Fig. 4). The basic instruction A variety of products have recently come on the market. These sets of all the products are the same, and migration products are getting better, smaller, and lighter. from the low end to the high end is possible with keeping the software competence. The main feature of the MCU products is that they RECENT TRENDS OF MOBILE MULTIMEDIA incorporate high-capacity read-only memories CONSUMER PRODUCTS (ROMs) mainly for program storage, multifunction Fig. 2 shows recent trends of mobile multimedia multichannel timers, serial communication interfaces, consumer products. Various types of products have analog-to-digital (AD) and digital-to-analog (DA) appeared in the market. The H/PC, for example, has converters, and so forth. The ROM lineup consists of become popular in the first half of the 1990s. Initially, erasable programmable ROMs (EPROMs) and flash it was used for keeping track of schedules or addresses. memories as well as the low-cost mask ROMs, and Recently, however, its network function makes it effectively shortens the development period of possible to handle electronic mail and access the multimedia applications, for which “Time to Market” Internet. The digital still camera must be able to encode is the key issue. and decode still images in a JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group) format in a short time. Recently, motion picture processing capability is also required. The 100 MPEG camera encodes and decodes digital moving picture data by an MPEG1 or MPEG4 standard in a real time. The MP3 player decodes MPEG1 audio layer 10 MPEG2 encode 3. The smart phone is a mobile phone that can be connected to the Internet and can send and receive 1 MPEG2 decode electronic mail. MPEG4 encode and decode MPEG1 Fig. 3 shows the processor performance and the encode Modem storage media capacity required for several multimedia 0.1 MPEG1 applications. Software is ideal for processing various Required performance (GOPS) MP3 decode multimedia operations flexibly. It is already available JPEG decode 0.01 for processing audio data in an MP3 format or the 0.01 0.1 1 10 100 modem. The quality of MPEG4 images covers a wide Storage media capacity (Gbyte) range, so some MPEG4 standards can be processed (Video, audio: 10 hours, still image: 1,000 images) by the software. However, the MPEG2 images are very GOPS: Giga Operations per Second hard for the software to process. Therefore, it is still important to enhance the multimedia performance. It Fig. 3—Processor Performance and Storage Media Capacity for is also important to fasten and increase the size of main Multimedia Processing. Better performance processors and higher capacity storage memories for processing large volumes of data at high media are necessary for processing video such as MPEG2. Hitachi Review Vol. 48 (1999), No. 6 311 MIPS: mega instructions per second MOPS: mega operations per second Core development GFLOPS: giga floating-point operations per second SIMD MMU: memory management unit DSP: digital signal processor 1,000 MIPS SH-5 SIMD: single instruction multiple data Superscalar 3 products 230-360 MIPS/0.93-1.4 GFLOPS SH-4 SH7750 series On-chip DSP 173 MIPS/266 MOPS SH3-DSP SH7720 series MPU series ON-chip MMU and cache 7 products Fig. 4—SuperH 59-173 MIPSSH-3 SH7700 series RISC Engine Series Roadmap. On-chip DSP On-chip flash memory SuperH RISC engine 78 MIPS/120 MOPSSH-DSP SH7610 series SH7060 series series includes a On-chip cache ON-chip flash memory Timer enhance wide performance 37 MIPS SH-2 SH7600 series SH7040 series SH7050 series Derivative, high-speed version range and low power 37-43 MIPS 26-52 MIPS products, and SH7030 series 6 products 3 products MCU series satisfies the various 26 MIPS SH-1 SH7020 series requirements of the 4 products mobile multimedia products. The MPU products incorporate memory manage- for Dreamcast,*2 the latest home video game console ment units (MMUs), which support Windows CE*1, from Sega Enterprises, Ltd. The SH-4 is used for the de facto standard operating system. High-capacity Hitachi’s high-end H/PC making use of the reduced caches are also incorporated to process large programs power dissipation for mobile applications. and data efficiently. Basic peripherals such as direct The advantages of the H/PC are its data memory access controllers (DMACs) and timers are compatibility with PCs, compactness, and long battery also incorporated to reduce the number of parts and life. It will soon perform and function similar to the the cost of the system. The high-speed products, 133- PC, but with greater portability and convenience. MHz SH-3 series and 200-MHz SH-4 series, line up Hitachi will develop the SH3-DSP, SH-4, and SH-5, to process the multimedia middleware quickly. which will have better performance to meet market requirements of H/PCs. Application to Multimedia Products The digital still camera is one application of the MEMORY PRODUCT LINEUP FOR SH2-DSP. The SH2-DSP runs the JPEG software at MULTIMEDIA AND ITS APPLICATIONS high speed with its DSP (digital signal processor) Flash Memories function. The number of parts and on-chip peripherals Flash memories are nonvolatile, electrically- required is low, which realizes small and inexpensive rewritable memories. The random-access NOR-type camera. flash memory is used for program storage for mobile Since car navigation systems first appeared in the phones or PCs. The high-capacity serial-access AND- market, SH-1 and SH-2 have been used extensively or NAND-type flash memory is used for data storage because of their direct memory interfaces and high- for digital cameras or H/PCs. capacity on-chip ROMs, and because their fast Hitachi developed a high-capacity, small cell-size, multiply-add operation can draw graphics at high AND-type flash memory. The cost is kept low by using speed. Recently, the higher-performance SH-3 and SH- MGM (mostly good memory) technology. Hitachi 4 are being used for car information systems due to released the 64-Mbit version in 1996 and the 256-Mbit software compatibility and portability. The major application of the SH-3 is H/PCs which use Windows CE. The SH-4 features enhanced three- *1: Windows CE is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corp.