London / Munich, 4th November 2009 — Renesas Technology Europe today announced the release of a total of eight versions of the SH7266 and SH7267, two new high-performance 32-bit MCU products with an on-chip SRAM size of 1.5 MB, that are intended for embedded applications in the industrial and consumer fields such as displays for digital audio players or graphical dashboards. Sample shipments will begin in February 2010.
The SH7266 and SH7267 are the enhanced products of the SH7260 Series that belongs to the SuperH™ *1 Family of high-performance 32-bit RISC MCUs. They each have 1.5 MB of large-capacity on-chip SRAM, an increase of 50% from the 1 MB of earlier MCUs in the SH7260 Series, to take the place of external synchronous DRAM (SDRAM). This makes it possible to implement a VGA display (640 × 480 pixels) without the need for external SDRAM. The large-capacity SRAM can be used as a display frame buffer or as a work area for storing programs or data. The SH7266 is available in a 144-pin QFP package and the SH7267 in a 176-pin QFP package.
The SH7266 and SH7267 each have 1.5 MB of large-capacity on-chip SRAM that can be used in place of external SDRAM as a program or work area. The large-capacity SRAM can also be used as a display frame buffer for video data, eliminating the need to use external SDRAM for the frame buffer. When used as a frame buffer, the large-capacity SRAM can store two frames of video data in VGA format, an increase from the WQVGA format (480 × 240 pixels) of earlier products in the same series, which can be displayed on a TFT LCD panel via a display controller. This contributes to reducing overall system cost and size.
The SH7266 and SH7267 provide a new video display controller and digital video input pins for use with graphical and video display applications. These support functionality such as video recording, size reduction, alpha blending effects (superimposition of transparent or semitransparent images), and superimposition of video input. Digital RGB output pins allow output of images or video in RGB565 format (in which each colour is represented by 16 bits: 5 bits for the red [R] component, 6 bits for green [G], and 5 bits for blue [B]) at up to VGA size.
This on-chip functionality makes it possible to develop products, such as car information systems with rear-view or side-view camera display and midrange or low-end graphical dashboard systems, using fewer devices and at a lower cost.