SuperH

The SuperH (or SH) is a microprocessor architecture. The SuperH core is RISC based and found in a large number of embedded systems.

The SuperH family was first developed by Hitachi as the successor to the H8 Family and was outsourced to the newly-formed SuperH Inc., owned by Hitachi and ST Microelectronics. SuperH Inc now sells the designs of the CPU cores.

The SH-5 design added a SIMD Instruction Set called SHmedia and also supports the SHcompact instruction set, equivalent to the user-mode parts of the SH-4 instruction set. This is similar to the Thumb Instruction Set of ARM architecture.

The older designs are now supported and sold by Renesas.

The family includes:

• SH-1 - 32-bit with maximum of 20MHz (As used on Sega Saturn to control the CD-drive and to check the Copy Protection on the game's CD)
• SH-2 - 32-bit with up to 28.7MHz (As used in the Sega 32X and Sega Saturn)
• SH-3 - 32-bit with up to 200MHz. This spring introduced a memory management unit to the SH Family (As used in many Windows CE devices)
• SH-4 - 32-bit dual-issue core with a 128-bit vector FPU (As used in the Dreamcast and on some Sega Arcade Machines such as the Naomi and Naomi 2)
• SH-5 - 64-bit core with a 128-bit vector FPU (64 32-bit registers) and an integer unit which includes the SIMD support and 63 64-bit registers. (The 64th register is hard-wired to zero.)

Examples include ST Microelectronics' ST40 or Hitachi's SH-4.

Distinctions

• Low price
• Low power consumption

External links

• http://www.superh.com
• http://www.renesas.com

Linux for SuperH

• http://www.sh-linux.org
• http://linuxdc.sourceforge.net
• MPC Data SHLinux support

NetBSD on SuperH

• http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/sh3/
• http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/sh5/

Programmer Resources

• SH-1 and SH-2 Programmer's Reference Manual
• SH-4 Programmer's Reference Manual