Renesas Electronics R-Mobile A1 application processors

Renesas Electronics has released the R-Mobile A1 series of application processors for personal navigation devices and other portable devices.

The series integrates the company’s SH-Mobile R series and EMMA Mobile series, which are used as application processors for navigation devices and portable media players and contribute to increased functionality, improved performance and lower power consumption, while achieving reduced total costs.

The series includes support for full high definition video recording and playback and reception of high image quality, high-resolution terrestrial digital TV broadcasts.

In addition to the conventional VPU5F engine, the devices also incorporate a VCP1 as a high-performance, low-power image-processing engine, that makes them possible to record and playback full-HD resolution video and receive and display full-segment terrestrial digital TV broadcasts.

The VCP1 engine is capable of recording and playback at 30 frames-per-second; full HD video encoded in the MPEG2, MPEG4 and H.264/MPEG4 AVC video compression standards.

The VPU5F engine supports video recording and playback in SD format. The devices support ISDB-T as the broadcast standard. Renesas plans to add support for worldwide digital TV broadcast standards, including CMMB, CTTB(DTMB) and DVB-T.

The series includes 3D graphics functions with improved performance. The company adopted the PowerVR SGX540 from Imagination Technologies, which provides performance of up to 20 million polygons per second.

The devices incorporate both the SH-4A core and the ARM Cortex-A9 that operate at a maximum operating frequency of 800 MHz and thus achieve up to 3.7 giga instructions per second.

The processors incorporate a 32-bit bus, a 400 MHz DDR3 (DDR800) controller and offer low-cost memory. The devices also include USB 2.0, gigabit ethernet and HDMI display controller functions as well as a set of other peripheral functions.

A pin-compatible version without the 3D graphics functions is also available.