Buckinghamshire, England:
Claimed as the fastest general-purpose flash microcontroller, Renesas' SH7211F features two banks of the company's MONOS flash. The device will find homes in next-generation motor drives and high-performance industrial systems.

The device's two banks of MONOS flash are interleaved and cached to achieve over 350 Dhrystone MIPS performance. MONOS flash currently offers a read access time of 12.5ns. According to the company, the next generation will clock in at 10ns.

The device's SH-2A CPU core has a superscalar Harvard structure with twin execution units and five-stage pipelines to achieve a 2.4MIPS/MHz performance rating. The CPU also features 15 register banks, each with 16 general-purpose registers that are 32bits wide. As a result, the CPU can quickly react to interrupts in 40ns at 160MHz.