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Embedded processors are increasingly being used in digital consumer appliances such as cellular phones, digital still/video cameras, and car navigation systems. They must deliver high performance with reasonable area and power consumption and be flexible enough to meet a wide range of requirements for various applications. However, only a few devices targeting large markets, such as cellular phones, can bear the cost of a special-purpose processor design. An alternative is to use optional modules, such as DSPs and floating-point units (FPUs), to augment the capabilities of the basic processing core. An optional DSP can be added as an execution unit, which is much smaller than a full DSP core, to effectively accelerate standardized applications such as multimedia [1]. While PCs and game consoles can bear the high cost of special graphics hardware much larger than a processor core [2][3], other digital consumer appliances cannot. An optional FPU handles a wide dynamic range of data thus simplifying programming, especially for graphics acceleration. Therefore, an optional FPU is a good approach to achieve high graphics performance with an embedded processor [4]. A flexible SuperH TM (SH) processor core is developed to meet these requirements.The specifications of the SH processor core are shown in Fig. 18.5.1. The use of an on-chip RAM ensures real-time response, a key feature of embedded processors. Micrographs of the standard-version processor core and the first product chip for car navigation systems are shown in Fig. 18.5.2. A low power version is integrated in an application processor for cellular phones [5].

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