Enabling next-generation of consumer electronics applications

The progress in consumer electronic has been unbelievable in this decade. The interesting factor is not just on the changes of the products’ performance and price, but also the functionality of each product group, which has also gone wild. This is particularly truth in the mobile phone segment, whereby the features have stretched from its basic communication function, toward leisure and work. It has in fact eaten into the camera, PDA, and navigation pie. Another interesting overlapping functionality space is the PC and embedded system segment.

These changes are all due to human needs, and thus the objective of application development has been heading toward human focus. The coming trend will be the invading of health care product into the consumer space, or we shall say, consumer goods will be seen carrying healthcare functionalities soon. We may also see basic healthcare measurement systems for heart rate, blood, and temperature, being integrated into mobile phones, laptops, TVs, car and even bicycle! This is inevitable as health will be next big thing that mankind will be worrying about.

Generally, we see more functions being integrated into each product, and connectivity between products is getting more important. The competition in consumer goods has been very intense. Unless there is a certain degree of uniqueness or slickness, price will be the next factor used to determine the popularity of the product.

These therefore push for a better performance and well integrated microcontroller. A decade ago, a 10MHz 8-bit controller with 16kB flash will be a wonderful chip. But with current requirements, developers will need something more powerful and less pricy. Thus in most cases, those high-end 500MHz processors will not fit into this classification.

Renesas Electronic has the world biggest MCU market share. With its huge and wide customer base, and being the leader in MCU technology, Renesas Electronic created a new series of 32-bit MCUs to meet the market trend. Designed on 90nm technology, the RX (Renesas eXtreme) is a mid-range 32-bit MCU that achieves 200MHz at a processing power of 1.65DMIPS/MHz(Dhrystone Version 2.1) and a low-power consumption of 0.03mA/MHz.



The RX CPU core is a Harvard-type CISC architecture, which allows both instructions fetch and memory access to be done independently. It has a five-stage pipeline that caters for Out-of-Order Completion. In addition, the core has an FPU (Floating Point Unit) and DSP arithmetic functions. The RX core has a set of 89 variable bytes length instructions. These are frequently used instructions identified from various actual application programs. The instructions are improved and enhanced, whereby frequently used codes are limited to one- and four-byte lengths. The code efficiency are further enhanced by the RX architecture, such as 16x 32-bit general purposes registers, 64-bit accumulator, three operands format, extra addressing modes, etc. This brings a 35 percent code efficiency improvement over the previous devices.

With the built-in FPU, developers do not have to make special code adjustment and lookup table to deal with floating point data. The wonder of FPU is about accurate, easy and fast mathematical calculation. For example, consider a 64-sample size FFT calculation. The FPU in RX can give a 6x improvement in speed. With FPU disable, RX takes about 1.2ms, whereas when FPU is enabled, RX will takes about 0.2ms to complete the task!

A good core has to be supported with excellent single-cycle access flash memory. If the core is capable of achieving higher speed, but the connecting flash doesn’t support this, the overall system throughput will be lowered due to the needs of inserting wait stages during execution. An alternative solution is to execute the code in RAM or cache. This calls for a bigger and more expensive built-in SRAM. Moreover extra process is required to move the code to the SRAM section. The following gives a good illustration of RX system performance with the integrated high speed MONOS flash memory (Fig. 1). At the speed of 100MHz, there will be no wait state inserted for RX, thus it will have a further 30 percent better performance than devices that need to insert wait states.

Supporting tools
Tools ensure the easy migration and creation of codes. Renesas has enhanced and improved the Renesas Tools to support RX, with new debuggers—E1 and E20—created to support more sophisticated requirements. In addition to the utility PDG (Peripheral Driver Generator), which enables easy peripherals code generation, more free middleware will be available in its website soon. Because these codes conform toward the Renesas MCU peripherals API, integration will be seamless and easy.

Renesas’ collaboration with many partners, including IAR, Micrium, Segger, DATA IO, among others, provides others sources of supporting tools on Compiler, Debugger, OS, Middleware and Programmer.

In this competitive and fast changing consumer electronics environment, it is always important to be prepared for next waves of change. Renesas believes that the RX performance, peripherals, power consumption, price, tool and solution will be the right choice for designers to create the most popular product for today and tomorrow’s consumers.

Renesas Electronic Singapore