Date: 27/02/2011

Low power car navigation sytem SoC IC chip with high media processing power

The new R-Car M1 series of SoCs are Renesas Electronics' first members of the R-Car series, which represent the integration of the company's SH-Navi series and EMMA Car series products. These devices have had high adoption rates in car infotainment systems, such as dashboard-mounted car navigation systems. The R-Car M1 series of SoCs have been developed for mid-range systems which are expected to become the highest volume segment in the market and include the R-Car M1A and R-Car M1S as its lineup.

The R-Car M1 series of SoCs share the following key features:
1. Integration of the dedicated circuitry for intelligent multimedia processing saves approximately 92 percent of power in full 1920 × 1080-pixel HD (high-definition) video decoding relative to executing the same function in software on previous products.
2. Dedicated power supply IC for use in a voltage regulator reduces power consumption by approximately 20 percent from Renesas Electronics' existing products.
3. The POWERVR SGX graphics core enhances 3D rendering performance, allowing designers to create realistic graphical user interfaces (GUIs, Note 3) and improved user operability.
4. Incorporation of ARM Cortex-A9 and Renesas Electronics SH-4A CPU cores operating at a maximum 800 megahertz (MHz), deliver superior processing performance of up to 3.7 Giga Instructions Per Second (GIPS.)

Dashboard-mounted car navigation systems have been required to offer lower power consumption, especially when used in electric vehicles. These systems must also offer high-performance multimedia processing for video and audio, and an advanced HMI with realistic 3D graphics display, and improved user operability.As per Renesas the R-Car M1 SoCs support these demands and can achieve cost reduction, system miniaturization and reduced development time.

Key Features of the R-Car M1 Series of SoCs:

1. The R-Car M1 SoCs incorporate video processing IP coded as VPU5HD2 to deliver encoding and decoding performance of 30 frames per second (fps) in full 1080 HD with MPEG-2, while meeting the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression standard, and offers MPEG-4 decoding and VC-1 decoding. Renesas says the VPU5HD2 helps save approximately 92 percent of power compared to the same function done with software processing.
The new SoCs also incorporate 24-bit audio processing engine enabling increased number of audio channels to be processed. Renesas says this engine helps save approximately 88 percent of power compared to CPU software processing.

2. Renesas is offering a separate dedicated power supply IC R2A11301 for this SoC. With the output voltage regulation of ±1 percent R2A11301 has two outputs implemented for CPU core voltage and for DDR (DDR2/DDR3) memory voltage. This power IC has integrated adaptive voltage scaling (AVS) function and on-chip A/D converter.
3. R-Car M1 series of SoCs use the latest POWERVR SGX 3D GPU from Imagination Technologies Limited for 3D graphics engine. While the R-Car M1 SoCs are targeted for mid-range systems, the drawing performance is faster than Renesas Electronics' existing devices, and should exceed the requirements of these systems says Renesas.
4. Drawing performance is measured at 20 M Polygon/s (mega polygons per second) and 1000 M Pixel/s (mega pixels per second) when operating at 200MHz. This allows the designer to achieve a more realistic GUI with richly detailed graphics
5. In the R-Car M1A SoC, the ARM Cortex-A9 operates at a maximum frequency of 800MHz as the main CPU, and it achieves 3.7 GIPS together with a sub CPU.
6. The R-Car M1A SoC also supports multimedia middleware available on the market and directly from Renesas Electronics. The R-Car M1S SoC is based on Renesas Electronics SH-4A core, which is capable of general-purpose computation and media processing.

Availability: Samples in May 2011
Price:
R-Car M1A: US$70
R-CAR M1S: US$65
Editorial Product Rating: ** (Average Plus)
For more details visit: www.renesas.com