SuperH MCU?

[sparkydonkey]

I know that there doesn't seem to be much use of the SuperH cores themselves (even Renesas only sell them as IP core alone now) but I nevertheless still had to wonder if in 2026 there is still someone who sells a general purpose MCU with this core or not?

[brucehoult]

Sacrifice some Sega Saturn or Dreamcast?

Or do you want a lot of them?

https://mou.sr/4xkMDhT  Gosh .. $80 each! But in 333 in stock, and 18 week lead time for more.

If you want 60, you can get them for only $60 each at digikey, although not in stock there and I didn't spot what the lead time is.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/renesas-electronics-corporation/R5F72167ADFA-V1/2551930

SuperH is a decent ISA, but doesn't have any advantage over Thumb2 or RISC-V.

[woofy]

Many moons ago I used the SH7021 in a product. It was an SH1 core at 20MHz and I remember being so impressed with the performance. I was using 8031's at the time for most jobs. One of the reason's it went the way of the dinosaur was Renesas itself. They were just an impossible company to deal with. No idea what they are like these days. Unless its commodity stuff in the catalogues I don't use them.

[SiliconWizard]

Yep remember this from the Dreamcast. Was a good ISA for its time. As Bruce said, it's nothing spectacular though by today's standards and given the price of current MCUs/SoCs with a SuperH core, that's something you'll have to buy pretty much only if you have to keep producing an old design or reuse code bases. Renesas owns the IP of the SuperH cores so you're not likely to find any other vendor making chips using it.

The SuperH ISA itself has been reverse-engineered and since the patents have expired, it's free to use: https://j-core.org/. I haven't heard of any commercial chip based on a J-Core, but if anyone has, let us know.

Renesas owns the original implementations: SH-1 to SH-6.

[sparkydonkey]

woofy - Renesas does seem to be interested in selling Arm-powered chips alone but that maybe doesn't surprise me too much as I know the same seem to have happened to a few other particular pre-arm/riscv companies too

as for J-core, I did indeed ran across that website last month but it seem like it has long lost a lot of steam with 2016 generally seeming to be the last official progress/news from them

[peter-h]

was Renesas itself. They were just an impossible company to deal with

Indeed; very few people buy CPUs from them, due to crap marketing and support. But Hitachi got into the market early c. 1990 with the H8/3xx and H8/5xx. They are otherwise a good company, running chips for some 25 years (with Atmel you might get 2.5 years ).

[az1]

was Renesas itself. They were just an impossible company to deal with

Indeed; very few people buy CPUs from them, due to crap marketing and support. But Hitachi got into the market early c. 1990 with the H8/3xx and H8/5xx. They are otherwise a good company, running chips for some 25 years (with Atmel you might get 2.5 years ).

Given what their support teams have to work with I'd say their support is pretty good.  I think there's definitely some cultural issues at play both in dealing with a Japanese company and in dealing with a company that's the product of a bunch of mergers.  Unfortunately their documentation has few redeeming qualities.

As someone who's been poking at some of their offerings recently, it seems like they've bet the farm on ARM and are tepidly embracing RISC-V.  The newer ARM stuff is definitely interesting though (1 GHz CM85 certainly raised a few eyebrows).

[Darkover]

I made some development with SH2A in the past. Nice MCU, Plenty of ram, superscalar, cool and fast debug enviroment (HEW), very fast for interrupt because they mirror all register many times and switch only registerbanks for every irq.

The company themself was also okay. Renesas never liked the ARM-Hype in the last 10-15 years and I think they are very happy that ARM is now on its end when everybody switch to RiscV.