Wilsonville, Oregon-based Mentor Graphics Corp has declared its support for Hitachi Ltd’s 32-bit embedded SuperH RISC processor, by integrating it with its own Seamless Co-Verification Environment, a hardware and software-based support tool for developing complex embedded systems. The package enables users to run applications or embedded software against a hardware simulation. The integration is meant to help designers shorten the design cycle by enabling them to verify the hardware-software interface of their embedded core ASICs before they commit to a silicon implementation. For Hitachi, the SuperH processor represents one of its biggest sellers, having shipped some 12 million by January last year (CI No 2,836). One of its biggest buyers is Sega Enterprises Ltd, who uses it in its Saturn games console. However, more recently Sega has started to lose market share to its main rivals Sony Corp and Nintendo Corp, who both use MIPS RISC chips for their flagship machines. Mentor Graphics is however, according to Jim Kenney, marketing manager for the firm’s Co-Design Business Unit, supporting the SuperH because of high customer demand within the Japanese automotive industry, and has seen no call at all for its support tool from the games industry. Outside of Japan, its main source of SuperH-based business has been from the telecommunications industry. The company also said that the SuperH is one of 20 different embedded processors it supports, which include MIPS chips from NEC Corp, Toshiba Corp and LSI Logic Inc, as well as Intel Corps X86-ARM chips and Motorola Corp’s 683xx. Hitachi for its part, has said it hopes to push the SuperH into other markets, and says it is gaining ground in car navigation devices and digital cameras, of which it claims 70% to 80% currently use the SuperH. It also pointed out that five out of seven vendors of hand-held devices are using the chip.
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