Page 8 Epson Research and Development
Vancouver Design Center
S1D13504 Interfacing to the NEC VR4102 Microprocessor
X19A-G-007-07 Issue Date: 01/02/02
2 Interfacing to the NEC VR4102

2.1 The NEC VR4102 System Bus

The VR-Series family of microprocessors features a high-speed synchronous system bus
typical of modern microprocessors. Designed with external LCD controller support and
Windows CE-based embedded consumer applications in mind, the VR4102 offers a highly
integrated solution for portable systems. This section provides an over view of the operation
of the CPU bus in order to establish interface requirements.

2.1.1 Overview

The NEC VR4102 is designed around the RISC architecture developed by MIPS. This
microprocessor is based on the 66MHz VR4100 CPU core which supports 64-bit
processing. The CPU communicates with the Bus Control Unit (BCU) using its internal
SysAD bus. The BCU in turn communicates with external devices using its ADD and DAT
buses which can be dynamically sized to 16 or 32-bit operation.
The NEC VR4102 has direct support for an external LCD controller. Specific control
signals are assigned for an external LCD controller providing an easy int erface to the CPU.
A 16M byte block of memory is assigned for the LCD controller and its own chip select
and ready signals available. Word or byte accesses are con tr olled by the system high byte
signal (SHB#).