| Kunio Uchiyama | System LSI Research Dept., Central Research Lab., |
| Hirofumi Mukai | Business Unit 9, Semiconductor & Integrated Circuits, |
| Ikuya Kawasaki | Mobile LSI Processor 1st Design Dept., Mobile LSI Business Unit, Semiconductor & Integrated Circuits, |
| Tsuguji Tachiuchi | Middleware Development, Software Technology Div., Software & Hardware Technologies, Semiconductor & Integrated Circuits, |
Hitachi has put the H8/300 and H8/300L series 8-bit microcomputers, the H8/300H, H8S/2000 and H8S/2600 series 16-bit microcomputers and the SuperH RISC engine series 32-bit microcomputer into commercial production to meet the various requirements placed on electronic appliances in the consumer product, information, communications and industrial fields. Upward compatibility is maintained throughout the H8/H8S series, from the H8/300L at the low end to the H8S/2600 model at the high end. The series includes inexpensive and reduced power consumption models with limited numbers of pins, the world's highest level CPU core for 16-bit microcomputer performance, large amounts of on-chip flash memory and a variety of peripheral modules, and allows you to select the combination that best suits your system. The SuperH RISC engine series allows you to freely select from among CPU cores with 26 to 360 MIPS (million instructions per second) performance based on our 16-bit, fixed-length instruction RISC (reduced instruction set computer) architecture. This series includes SH2-DSP/SH3-DSP models that incorporate DSPs (digital signal processors) and vector-type FPUs (floating-point units) for which there is strong demand from the network and multimedia fields. Hitachi has also developed the SH-5 with performance in the 1,000-MIPS class and an architecture expanded to 64 bits as the next-generation processor. Hitachi has also developed middleware for voice, image, audio and communications applications, to be run mainly on the SuperH RISC engines. It is very easy to construct products for network and multimedia applications on the basis of the middleware.
microprocessor, microcomputer, CPU, multimedia, network
