Car audio: New generation of microcontrollers

A look inside your car audio with a new generation of electronic chips.

Offering About 70 Percent Higher Speed Than Previous Renesas Solutions, the New MCUs Have the Performance Needed to Handle Control and Signal Processing Tasks.

Renesas Technology America, Inc. today announced five SH7263 single-chip solutions for simplifying and reducing the cost of car audio, home audio, and similar digital audio systems that offer more performance and features. The new SuperH 32-bit microcontrollers have a 200MHz, 32-bit SH-2A CPU core with am built-in floating point unit (FPU) and include a USB2.0 Host interface for portable-audio-player connectivity and an LCD controller for WVGA-size color screens. They also integrate a CD-ROM decoder and additional audio peripherals, among many other on-chip functions.

"The ideal single-chip solution clearly is a moving target," said Paul Sykes, segment marketing manager, automotive business unit, Renesas Technology America, Inc. "System makers are constantly upgrading the performance and functionality of their products. Renesas, like other semiconductor manufacturers, constantly innovates, pushing technology limits to deliver chips that customers can use to produce designs with advanced features."

Compared to the previous-generation 120MHz SH7261, the new 200MHz SH7263 microcontrollers deliver about 70 percent more speed, achieving 480 MIPS (million instructions per second) and 400 MFLOPS (mega floating-point number operations per second) performance. Moreover, the new devices have a higher level of integration which includes a host interface that supports the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard v2.0 High-Speed specification, and a display controller that supports color liquid crystal panels up to WVGA size (800 x 480 pixels). They are also capable of supporting various digital audio CODEC middleware formats, including MP3, WMA, and AAC.

The high processing performance that the SH7263 microcontrollers deliver lets customers implement multi-CODEC compatibility by software alone, for greater design flexibility. The devices also allow support for the Digital Rights Management (DRM) required for audio content protection processing through music distribution. These capabilities are a response to strong customer demand for reducing the number of component parts by incorporating digital audio processing functions in the microcontrollers previously used mainly just for system control.

The instruction set of the SH2A-FPU in the SH7263 and SH7203 microcontrollers is upward compatible with those of the SH-2A and SH-2 CPU cores, allowing customers to reuse programs developed for existing products. At the same time, ROM code efficiency has been improved by approximately 75 percent compared with the SH-2 core, an improvement that makes it possible to reduce program size by approximately 25 percent.

The high signal processing performance and ROM code efficiency enable MP3, WMA, AAC, and similar voice and music data compression and expansion processing to be executed by an SH7263 chip at a lower frequency and by a smaller program. As a result, system control and digital audio processing previously performed by separate chips can all be handled by an SH7263, so fewer components are needed. This makes it possible to implement a low-power-consumption system at lower cost.

The SH7263 also incorporates many other functions ideal for audio systems. They include a sampling rate converter (SRC) that converts the audio data sampling frequency, a serial sound interface (SSI) for input and output of digital audio data, a serial communication interface with 16-stage FIFO (SCIF), and an I2C bus interface. There is also an 8-channel 10-bit A/D converter, a 2-channel 8-bit D/A converter, 8-channel direct memory access control (DMAC), control area network (CAN) controller, and NAND flash controller. A 5-channel multifunction timer unit (MTU2) is suitable for motor control and can produce a 3-phase pulse width modulation (PWM) wave output for controlling AC motors.

The company also announced the SH7203 microcontroller, which lacks the on-chip audio oriented functions and is suitable for many general consumer and industrial applications.

On-chip debugging functions enable real-time debugging to be carried out at the maximum operating frequency. For the development environment, the USB bus-powered E10A-USB requiring no external power supply can be used as an emulator. The comprehensive range of hardware and software development tools available from Renesas and third parties includes the High-performance Embedded Workshop integrated development environment. MP3, WMA, AAC, and other voice-compression-standard compatible middleware products are also available, as are a CD-ROM ISO9660 file system and a HDD FAT32 file system.

Related news: Foursprung, P4MR, car audio

Source: Telematics Journal

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