Renesas Technology Europe’s SH77721 device is the first product of its SH-NaviJ car navigation SoC (System on Chip) series. The device is designed for small portable navigation systems and low- to middle-range dashboard mounted car navigation systems.
 
The SH77721 incorporates the same SuperH Family top-end SH-4A CPU core as used in existing SH-Navi Series products, featuring a maximum operating frequency of 333 MHz and a CPU processing performance of 599 MIPS. The floating-point processing unit (FPU) achieves a processing performance of 2.3 GFlops (giga floating-point operations per second). The instruction set is upwardly compatible with that of the SH-4.

The device incorporates a graphics processor with 3-D and 2-D drawing functions. With these capabilities, the quality of screen displays are almost identical to those of high-end systems, allowing the representation of a wide variety of 3-D objects in maps, as well as map, icon, and menu, and graphical user interface (GUI).

The single drawing processor can draw an advanced map display composed of a wide variety of 3-D contents, such as buildings and landmarks on a map, and richly expressive GUI display by the heavy use of graphics functions, as well as 2-D contents like maps, icons, and menus. Renesas Technology also offers a high-performance 2-D and 3-D graphics library that allows developers to extract the maximum performance from the graphics processor.

The 3-D graphics library has an industry standard interface and its user-friendly API (Application Programming Interface) makes it easy to utilize the rendering functions supported by the graphics processor. In addition, the 2-D graphics library is pursuant to the specification GDI-Sub compliant with Microsoft's Windows Automotive 5.0 Service Pack 2.

The ICs also incorporate peripheral modules necessary for car navigation, such as a USB v2.0 High Speed host/function interface, an SD card host interface, a GPS baseband processing module, an FM multiplex decoder, and a CAN in-vehicle LAN interface. This comprehensive range of peripheral functions helps reduce the total number of component parts needed in a car navigation system, and makes it possible to achieve high system performance at a lower system costs.

Compared to earlier versions of the SH-Navi series, the new series now features a 16-bit-bus DDR2 (Double Data Rate 2) memory interface, allowing connection of a single external memory device. In addition, the use of a Unified Memory Architecture enables memory to be shared by the various modules, making it possible to reduce the number of external memory parts.

The provision of a limited peripheral function set together with the use a 440-pin BGA package (23 mm × 23 mm) has made possible a major reduction in size compared with the 520-pin BGA package (33 mm × 33 mm) of the current SH7770, enabling the board area of a car navigation device or the like to be reduced.

An E10A-USB emulator connected to a host PC via a USB interface can be used as a development environment, and the provision of an on-chip debugging function allows real-time debugging to be carried out at the maximum operating frequency.

More information: www.renesas.eu