Development of processor cores for digital consumer appliances

Embedded processors are increasingly being used in digital consumer appliances such as cellular phones, digital still/video cameras, and car navigation systems. They must therefore deliver high performance within a reasonable area and power consumption level, and be flexible to meet a wide range of requirements for various applications. In this paper, we introduce our latest processor core SH‐X developed under the above background. The low‐power version of the SH‐X core achieves 360 MIPS with a power of 80 mW resulting in the high power‐performance ratio of 4500 MIPS/W. The standard version achieves 720 MIPS with a power of 250 mW, 2.8 GFLOPS, and 36M polygons/s graphics performance. The leak currents in the resume standby and U‐standby modes are 100 and 10µA, respectively. The resume standby mode can return the status before the standby in only 3 ms, while the U‐standby mode requires reset sequence to restart. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 37(3): 10–19, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.20450