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Renesas Technology is looking to combine one of its 
SH processor cores with programmable logic to create what could be its first reconfigurable microprocessor.
Dr Katsuhiro Tsukamoto, president and chief operating officer at Renesas Technology told Electronics Weekly at Electronica 
this week that such as reconfigurable device may be developed if it was the best solution for customers.
"There is some development work to combine a CPU with a programmable logic array, " said Tsukamoto.
According to Tsukamoto, an important element of the design would be defining the bus structure which provides the links between the CPU and programmable elements.
"We are looking at developing a bus structure to support this," said Tsukamoto.
The microcontroller business lies at the heart of all that Renesas does and Tsukamoto also gave a hint of the company's ambitions with regard to multicore processor. On the day that Renesas announced its first dual core microcontroller in its SH range, Tsukamoto also indicated plans for a quad-core microcontroller.
"We have a prototype of a processor with eight SH cores with a power consumption of just 3.3W," said Tsukamoto.
While there are no plans to bring the eight core device to market any time soon, Tsukamoto said a quad-core processor aimed at graphics and image-processing applications could be sampling as early as 2010.
The dual-core SH7205 microcontroller is aimed at consumer and automotive markets and according to Tsukamoto, it is the automotive market which is pushing the power/performance needs of multicore microcontrollers.
The SH7205 has two SH-2A cores each running at 200MHz and each giving 480DMIPS performance.