Renesas Electronics intros industry’s smallest SoCs for LCD digital TVs with full HD support

SANTA CLARA, USA: Renesas Electronics Corp. announced the availability of two new compact and power efficient system-on-chip (SoC) products, the R8A66983BG and R8A66980BG, which integrate in a single package the main signal processing functions, such as video and audio processing, and high-picture quality required in LCD digital televisions for the North American market. The R8A66983BG SoC supports full HD (Note 1), and the R8A66980BG SoC supports WXGA.

The new products:
(1) have a mounting area of 17 × 17 millimeters (mm), reduced by approximately 45 percent from that of Renesas Electronics’ existing SoC products, making the R8A66983BG device the smallest SoC in the industry to provide full HD support for LCD digital TVs for the North American market,
(2) incorporate enhancements to the pin configuration, etc., allowing the use of a two-layer system board rather than a four-layer board, which contributes to more compact and overall low-cost systems, and
(3) comply with the Energy Star 4.0 international power efficiency standard (Note 4), making possible even lower power consumption.

Demand for LCD digital TVs is anticipated to continue to grow, and there is an expectation that prices will fall while at the same time picture quality improves. Also rising in demand is better power efficiency for more environmental friendliness.

Renesas Electronics currently mass produces the R8J66977BG (with full HD support) and R8J66975BG (with WXGA support) SoC products for LCD digital TVs for the North American market.

These SoCs integrate on a single chip the main signal processing functions and high-picture quality, from demodulation of the digital broadcast signal to signal output to the LCD panel, enabling more compact product design and also reducing the number of external memory (DRAM) chips required from two to one, due to their powerful processing capability.

These SoC products also effectively lower the total system cost. And now, Renesas Electronics’ new R8A66983BG and R8A66980BG SoCs deliver greater miniaturization while reducing both cost and power consumption even further.