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Drinkypoo San, may be you are right, SH are not bought. However they are still sold ;-) see https://www.renesas.com/en-us/...

Sigh.

We have chips, in use, that were of Motorola design when they were in cahoots with IBM and Apple. Then Freescale. Then NXP. Now Qualcomm. They just now updated their default install location from C:\Freescale to C:\NXP.

Maybe moving to Renesas won't be too terrible... then again they were NEC.

Look up ISO 26262 & ASPICE and other things related to 'functional safety'.

Not everything in the vehicle is, or needs to be, compliant but your powertrain and anything with life and safety is. This isn't fly by the night programmers coding a Radio GUI.

This stuff goes all the way down to the hardware level. With dual core CPUs running in lock step, dual memory banks and ECC memory. If there's a mismatch anywhere along the line an error is thrown.

http://www.nxp.com/products/pr...

https://www.renesas.com/en-us/...

Here's a electric toothbrush reference design from Texas Instruments.

Here's the MSP430G22x0 microcontroller used in the design.

Here's a list of software tools for that microcontroller. The list includes something called "GCC", which they say is an "Open Source Compiler for MSP Microcontrollers".

Here's a page from Renesas about electric toothbrush designs.

Here's a list of software tools for Renesas processors; they list C compilers for the R8C and RL78 microcontrollers, as mentioned in the previous page.

So don't assume all the code in your toothbrush was written in assembler language; some of it may have been written in C, although some of the low-level library routines might be written in assembler (or an asm in the C code).

Here's a electric toothbrush reference design from Texas Instruments.

Here's the MSP430G22x0 microcontroller used in the design.

Here's a list of software tools for that microcontroller. The list includes something called "GCC", which they say is an "Open Source Compiler for MSP Microcontrollers".

Here's a page from Renesas about electric toothbrush designs.

Here's a list of software tools for Renesas processors; they list C compilers for the R8C and RL78 microcontrollers, as mentioned in the previous page.

So don't assume all the code in your toothbrush was written in assembler language; some of it may have been written in C, although some of the low-level library routines might be written in assembler (or an asm in the C code).

superh
They imply that it's just hiding in navigation systems and such... and in motor control. heh, heh heh. How the mighty have fallen.

No ideer what happened to MIPS, though. There's still routers coming out with MIPS cores...

If I had to guess I'd say ARM just got better faster. Wikipedia implies the last major advance in SuperH was about a decade ago. MIPS could be the same. There's some cheap-ass MIPS-powered android devices. They're all pretty slow, that supports the idea that they just couldn't keep up with ARM.

not for Google TV).

Intel chips are expensive and these days you would be very much be expecting a highly integrated chip with demuxes and decoders for digital broadcasts, video and audio processing elements to improve the quality. There would typically be a whole bunch of functional units for most functions all baked onto the silicon. The General Purpose Processor would typically be fairly weak but with a lot of support. Main processors may get somewhat more powerful to support browser type technology but I wouldn't expect them to reach Intel Atom speeds in most cases for some time. Which would you rather have, a TV with a fast web browser or good picture processing?

The current Sony Google TVs (the integrated screens) still carry the same main chip as the rest of the Sony range in addition to the Intel processor and graphics. I'm not certain of the extent to which this is absolutely technically required or whether it was needed to use the existing TV reception and processing software. This means that the cost of the to build Google TV was like building a normal TV and adding a bare bones Atom PC. Expectation of pure additional sales, marketing funds from Intel and an expectation of smaller margins for retailers were what made the business case I understand although I think there were also some unreasonable assumptions particularly if you had ever tried the product.
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20101117/187451/
http://www2.renesas.com/digital_av/en/mpegdec_tv/emma3tl2.html

If Intel do back away from the highly cost sensitive TV chip business I would expect Google to offer support for ARM. I think most of the TV manufacturers on or moving to ARM although MIPS was is certainly used in current models. The newer high performance ARM chips are a probably significantly more expensive than the typical TV processors but probably make more sense than the Intel Atoms with the ability to custom specify the chip features and still be cheaper.

Features on such chips will be specified by major manufacturers but the feature set will probably be locked down at least 18-24 months before the TV ships ruling out some things after that date.

The TV business is hugely competitive market and there is no profit in it (possibly with the exception of companies that have their own panel manufacturing). The combination of falling prices, long parts lead times and the importance of volume to get component prices make it a very tricky business to make money in. But it is key to many companies positions in the Consumer Electronics area and can bring leverage into other businesses (by enabling retail space, offering full product suites and increasingly giving scale to over the top online video offerings.).

iSuppli
http://www.isuppli.com/MEMS-and-Sensors/News/Pages/Japans-Digital-Compass-Makers-Work-to-Maintain-Supply-Amid-Earthquake-Aftermath.aspx

MGC
http://www.mgc.co.jp/eng/news/2011/pdf/110318-2_e.pdf

Shin-Etsu
http://www.shinetsu.co.jp/e/news/s20110322.shtml

Renesas
http://am.renesas.com/press/notices/notice20110322.html

MEMC
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/memc-update-following-japan-earthquake-118003244.html

Hitachi
http://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/f_110317h.pdf

Fujitsu
http://www.fujitsu.com/global/news/pr/archives/month/2011/20110314-01.html

Nokia is one of the few companies that has really good wireless baseband technology.

Wireless tech was already sold last year.

Do you really need to run OpenOffice on M23R family CPU? M23R CPU is: "ideal for applications including general industrial and car-mounted systems, digital AV equipment, digital imaging equipment". Or you need OpenOffice on ARMB? ARMB is ARM machine with big endian (usually router or NAS storage).

What ya wanna do is subscribe to Circuit Cellar the magazine that is today what BYTE magazine was back in the z80 days. Full of articles on using modern, small processors to do "stuff". They also run some great Design Contests supported by various manufacturers that get you a development board and software (and generally extra chips!) for free.
These days, at the low end (less than 100 MHz), there is seldom a need to wire a processor up to much of any peripherals. For example, the motorola Coldfire processors are basically 200+ Mhz 68000 (e.g. 66Mhz with single-cycle instruction execution compared to the 68000's 4-10 cycle instructions) with just about any peripherals you might ever want onboard. Not really sufficient for a JRE, but not bad for just about anything else. Also, they're roughly $10 each in quantity. Many other manufacturers are making similar types of chips these days:
Hitachi processors
Rabbit Semiconductors
Zilog

One of the problems you'll have to deal with if you want to build your own systems is that Wire Wrap is simply unusable in this day and age. Not only is it impossible to find a socket for somthing like the 256-ball BGA that the coldfire comes in, or the more standard 144-pin QFP packages, the speeds make it unlikely you'll be able to use that technology successfully. I've built fine-pitch boards in my garage using photosensitive PCBs, but the best solution is something like PCBExpress or ExpressPCB and get 2 or 3 3"x3" double-sided boards for $60-$80. Even so, building high-speed systems is not for the amateur; laying out a system using PC-133 SDRAM is not something you want to do without a bit of up-to-date layout knowledge. Good luck, hope this gives you some pointers to get started with! /frank