1.
Tokyo Stock Exchange
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The Tokyo Stock Exchange, which is called Tōshō or TSE/TYO for short, is a stock exchange located in Tokyo, Japan. It is the fourth largest stock exchange in the world by market capitalization of its listed companies. It had 2,292 listed companies with a market capitalization of US$4.09 trillion as of April 2015. In July 2012 a planned merger with the Osaka Securities Exchange was approved by the Japan Fair Trade Commission, the resulting entity, the Japan Exchange Group, was launched on January 1,2013. The TSE is incorporated as a kabushiki gaisha with nine directors, four auditors and its headquarters are located at 2-1 Nihonbashi-Kabutochō, Chūō, Tokyo, or Kabuto-chō, which is the largest financial district in Japan. Its operating hours are from 8,00 to 11,30 a. m. from April 24,2006, the afternoon trading session started at its usual time of 12,30 p. m. Stocks listed on the TSE are separated into the First Section for large companies, the Second Section for mid-sized companies, as of October 31,2010, there are 1,675 First Section companies,437 Second Section companies and 182 Mothers companies. Ninety-four domestic and 10 foreign securities companies participate in TSE trading, see, Members of the Tokyo Stock Exchange Other TSE-related institutions include, The exchanges press club, called the Kabuto Club, which meets on the third floor of the TSE building. Most Kabuto Club members are affiliated with the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Kyodo News, Jiji Press, or business television broadcasters such as Bloomberg LP, the Kabuto Club is generally busiest during April and May, when public companies release their annual accounts. On 15 June 2007, the TSE paid $303 million to acquire a 4. 99% stake in Singapore Exchange Ltd. The Tokyo Stock Exchange was established on May 15,1878, as the Tokyo Kabushiki Torihikijo under the direction of then-Finance Minister Okuma Shigenobu, trading began on June 1,1878. In 1943, the exchange was combined with ten other stock exchanges in major Japanese cities to form a single Japanese Stock Exchange, the combined exchange was shut down and reorganized shortly after the bombing of Nagasaki. The Tokyo Stock Exchange reopened under its current Japanese name on May 16,1949, a new facility, called TSE Arrows, opened on May 9,2000. In 2010, the TSE launched its Arrowhead trading facility, in 2001, the TSE restructured itself as a stock company, before this time, it was structured as an incorporated association with its members as shareholders. The interruption in trading was the worst in the history of the exchange, trading was suspended for four-and-a-half hours. Mizuho failed to catch the error, the Tokyo Stock Exchange initially blocked attempts to cancel the order, on 11 December, the TSE acknowledged that its system was at fault in the Mizuho trade. On 21 December, Takuo Tsurushima, chief executive of the TSE, and two other senior executives resigned over the Mizuho affair. On January 17,2006, the Nikkei 225 fell 2. 8%, its fastest drop in nine months, the Tokyo Stock Exchange closed early on January 18 due to the trade volume threatening to exceed the exchanges computer systems capacity of 4.5 million trades per day
2.
Tokyo
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Tokyo, officially Tokyo Metropolis, is the capital of Japan and one of its 47 prefectures. The Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous area in the world. It is the seat of the Emperor of Japan and the Japanese government, Tokyo is in the Kantō region on the southeastern side of the main island Honshu and includes the Izu Islands and Ogasawara Islands. Formerly known as Edo, it has been the de facto seat of government since 1603 when Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu made the city his headquarters. It officially became the capital after Emperor Meiji moved his seat to the city from the old capital of Kyoto in 1868, Tokyo Metropolis was formed in 1943 from the merger of the former Tokyo Prefecture and the city of Tokyo. The Tokyo metropolitan government administers the 23 Special Wards of Tokyo, the metropolitan government also administers 39 municipalities in the western part of the prefecture and the two outlying island chains. The population of the wards is over 9 million people. The prefecture is part of the worlds most populous metropolitan area with upwards of 37.8 million people, the city hosts 51 of the Fortune Global 500 companies, the highest number of any city in the world. Tokyo ranked third in the International Financial Centres Development IndexEdit, the city is also home to various television networks such as Fuji TV, Tokyo MX, TV Tokyo, TV Asahi, Nippon Television, NHK and the Tokyo Broadcasting System. Tokyo ranked first in the Global Economic Power Index and fourth in the Global Cities Index. The city is considered a world city – as listed by the GaWCs 2008 inventory – and in 2014. In 2015, Tokyo was named the Most Liveable City in the world by the magazine Monocle, the Michelin Guide has awarded Tokyo by far the most Michelin stars of any city in the world. Tokyo ranked first in the world in the Safe Cities Index, the 2016 edition of QS Best Student Cities ranked Tokyo as the 3rd-best city in the world to be a university student. Tokyo hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics, the 1979 G-7 summit, the 1986 G-7 summit, and the 1993 G-7 summit, and will host the 2020 Summer Olympics, Tokyo was originally known as Edo, which means estuary. During the early Meiji period, the city was also called Tōkei, some surviving official English documents use the spelling Tokei. However, this pronunciation is now obsolete, the name Tokyo was first suggested in 1813 in the book Kondō Hisaku, written by Satō Nobuhiro. When Ōkubo Toshimichi proposed the renaming to the government during the Meiji Restoration, according to Oda Kanshi, Tokyo was originally a small fishing village named Edo, in what was formerly part of the old Musashi Province. Edo was first fortified by the Edo clan, in the twelfth century
3.
Japan
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Japan is a sovereign island nation in Eastern Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies off the eastern coast of the Asia Mainland and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea, the kanji that make up Japans name mean sun origin. 日 can be read as ni and means sun while 本 can be read as hon, or pon, Japan is often referred to by the famous epithet Land of the Rising Sun in reference to its Japanese name. Japan is an archipelago consisting of about 6,852 islands. The four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku, the country is divided into 47 prefectures in eight regions. Hokkaido being the northernmost prefecture and Okinawa being the southernmost one, the population of 127 million is the worlds tenth largest. Japanese people make up 98. 5% of Japans total population, approximately 9.1 million people live in the city of Tokyo, the capital of Japan. Archaeological research indicates that Japan was inhabited as early as the Upper Paleolithic period, the first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other regions, mainly China, followed by periods of isolation, from the 12th century until 1868, Japan was ruled by successive feudal military shoguns who ruled in the name of the Emperor. Japan entered into a period of isolation in the early 17th century. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan is a member of the UN, the OECD, the G7, the G8, the country has the worlds third-largest economy by nominal GDP and the worlds fourth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. It is also the worlds fourth-largest exporter and fourth-largest importer, although Japan has officially renounced its right to declare war, it maintains a modern military with the worlds eighth-largest military budget, used for self-defense and peacekeeping roles. Japan is a country with a very high standard of living. Its population enjoys the highest life expectancy and the third lowest infant mortality rate in the world, in ancient China, Japan was called Wo 倭. It was mentioned in the third century Chinese historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms in the section for the Wei kingdom, Wa became disliked because it has the connotation of the character 矮, meaning dwarf. The 倭 kanji has been replaced with the homophone Wa, meaning harmony, the Japanese word for Japan is 日本, which is pronounced Nippon or Nihon and literally means the origin of the sun. The earliest record of the name Nihon appears in the Chinese historical records of the Tang dynasty, at the start of the seventh century, a delegation from Japan introduced their country as Nihon
4.
Microcontroller
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A microcontroller is a small computer on a single integrated circuit. In modern terminology, it is a system on a chip or SoC, a microcontroller contains one or more CPUs along with memory and programmable input/output peripherals. Program memory in the form of Ferroelectric RAM, NOR flash or OTP ROM is also included on chip. Microcontrollers are designed for embedded applications, in contrast to the used in personal computers or other general purpose applications consisting of various discrete chips. Mixed signal microcontrollers are common, integrating analog components needed to control non-digital electronic systems, some microcontrollers may use four-bit words and operate at frequencies as low as 4 kHz, for low power consumption. Other microcontrollers may serve performance-critical roles, where they may need to act more like a signal processor, with higher clock speeds. The first microprocessor was the 4-bit Intel 4004 released in 1971, with the Intel 8008, however, both processors required external chips to implement a working system, raising total system cost, and making it impossible to economically computerize appliances. One book credits TI engineers Gary Boone and Michael Cochran with the creation of the first microcontroller in 1971. The result of their work was the TMS1000, which became available in 1974. It combined read-only memory, read/write memory, processor and clock on one chip and was targeted at embedded systems and it combined RAM and ROM on the same chip. This chip would find its way into one billion PC keyboards. At that time Intels President, Luke J. Valenter, stated that the microcontroller was one of the most successful in the companys history, most microcontrollers at this time had concurrent variants. One had an erasable EPROM program memory, with a transparent quartz window in the lid of the package to allow it to be erased by exposure to ultraviolet light, often used for prototyping. The PROM was of type of memory as the EPROM. The erasable versions required ceramic packages with quartz windows, making them more expensive than the OTP versions. The same year, Atmel introduced the first microcontroller using Flash memory, other companies rapidly followed suit, with both memory types. Cost has plummeted over time, with the cheapest 8-bit microcontrollers being available for under 0.25 USD in quantity in 2009, nowadays microcontrollers are cheap and readily available for hobbyists, with large online communities around certain processors. In the future, MRAM could potentially be used in microcontrollers as it has infinite endurance, in 2002, about 55% of all CPUs sold in the world were 8-bit microcontrollers and microprocessors
5.
NEC
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NEC Corporation is a Japanese multinational provider of information technology services and products, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. NEC provides IT and network solutions to enterprises, communications services providers and to government agencies. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited and its NEC Semiconductors business unit was one of the worldwide top 20 semiconductor sales leaders before merging with Renesas Electronics. NEC is a member of the Sumitomo Group, kunihiko Iwadare and Takeshiro Maeda established Nippon Electric Limited Partnership on August 31,1898 by using facilities that they had bought from Miyoshi Electrical Manufacturing Company. Iwadare acted as the partner, Maeda handled company sales. Western Electric, which had an interest in the Japanese phone market, was represented by Walter Tenney Carleton, Carleton was also responsible for the renovation of the Miyoshi facilities. It was agreed that the partnership would be reorganized as a company when treaty would allow it. On July 17,1899, the treaty between Japan and the United States went into effect. Nippon Electric Company, Limited was organized the day with Western Electric Company to become the first Japanese joint-venture with foreign capital. Ernest Clement and Carleton were named as directors, Maeda and Mototeru Fujii were assigned to be auditors. Iwadare, Maeda and Carleton handled the overall management, the company started with the production, sales and maintenance of telephones and switches. NEC modernized the facilities with the construction of the Mita Plant in 1901 at Mita Shikokumachi. It was completed in December 1902, the Japanese Ministry of Communications adopted a new technology in 1903, the common battery switchboard supplied by NEC. The common battery switchboards powered the subscriber phone, eliminating the need for a permanent magnet generator in each subscribers phone, the switchboards were initially imported, but were manufactured locally by 1909. NEC started exporting telephone sets to China in 1904, in 1905, Iwadare visited Western Electric in the U. S. to see their management and production control. On his return to Japan he discontinued the system of sub-contracting and replaced it with a new system where managers. Inefficiency was also removed from the production process, the company paid higher salaries with incentives for efficiency. New accounting and cost controls were put in place, and time clocks installed, between 1899 and 1907 the number of telephone subscribers in Japan rose from 35,000 to 95,000
6.
Hitachi
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Hitachi, Ltd. is a Japanese multinational conglomerate company headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. It is the parent company of the Hitachi Group and forms part of the DKB Group of companies, Hitachi is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the Nikkei 225 and TOPIX indices. It is ranked 38th in the 2012 Fortune Global 500 and 129th in the 2012 Forbes Global 2000, Hitachi was founded in 1910 by electrical engineer Namihei Odaira in Ibaraki Prefecture. The companys first product was Japans first 5-horsepower induction motor, initially developed for use in copper mining, odairas company soon became the domestic leader in electric motors and electric power industry infrastructure. The company began as a venture of Fusanosuke Kuharas mining company in Hitachi. Odaira moved headquarters to Tokyo in 1918, long before that, he coined the company’s toponymic name by superimposing two kanji characters, hi meaning “sun” and tachi meaning “rise”. The young companys national aspirations were conveyed by its original brand mark, world War II and its aftermath devastated the company. Many of its factories were destroyed by Allied bombing raids, and after the war, founder Odaira was removed from the company. Nevertheless, as a result of three years of negotiations, Hitachi was permitted to all but 19 of its manufacturing plants. The cost of such a production shutdown, though, compounded by a labor strike in 1950. Only the Korean War saved the company from complete collapse, Hitachi and many other struggling Japanese industrial firms benefited from defense contracts offered by the American military. Meanwhile, Hitachi went public in 1949, Hitachi America, Ltd. was established in 1959. Hitachi Europe, Ltd. was established in 1982, in March 2011, Hitachi agreed to sell its hard disk drive subsidiary, HGST, to Western Digital for a combination of cash and shares worth US$4.3 billion. Due to concerns of a duopoly of WD and Seagate Technology by the EU Commission, the transaction was completed in March 2012. The talks subsequently broke down and were suspended, the joint venture began operations in February 2014. It is a high density information storage medium utilizing laser etched/readable Fused quartz, Hitachi is taking for 2016 an estimated ¥65 billion write-off in value of a SILEX technology laser uranium enrichment joint venture with General Electric. Hitachi Consulting is a management and technology consulting firm with headquarters in Dallas, Texas. Hitachi Data Systems is an owned subsidiary of Hitachi which provides hardware, software
7.
Mitsubishi
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The Mitsubishi Group is a group of autonomous Japanese multinational companies in a variety of industries. Its total revenue is about 1. 4% percent of Japans GDP and it is historically descended from the Mitsubishi zaibatsu, a unified company which existed from 1870 to 1947 and was disbanded during the occupation of Japan following World War II. The former constituents of the continue to share the Mitsubishi brand, trademark. The three main companies in the group are The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Mitsubishi Corporation and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the Mitsubishi company was established as a shipping firm by Yatarō Iwasaki in 1870. In 1873, its name was changed to Mitsubishi Shokai, the name Mitsubishi consists of two parts, mitsu meaning three and hishi meaning water caltrop, and hence rhombus, which is reflected in the companys logo. It is also translated as three diamonds, Mitsubishi was established in 1870, two years after the Meiji Restoration, with shipping as its core business. Its diversification was mostly into related fields, the experience of overseas shipping led the firm to enter into a trading business. In 1881, the company bought into coal mining by acquiring the Takashima Mine, followed by Hashima Island in 1890 and they also diversified into shipbuilding, banking, insurance, warehousing, and trade. Later diversification carried the organization into such sectors as paper, steel, glass, electrical equipment, aircraft, oil, as Mitsubishi built a broadly based conglomerate, it played a central role in the modernization of Japanese industry. After moving to Japan, they designed the Mitsubishi 1MT, Mitsubishi B1M, Mitsubishi 1MF, the merchant fleet entered into a period of diversification that would eventually result in the creation of three entities, Mitsubishi Bank was founded in 1919. After its mergers with the Bank of Tokyo in 1996, and UFJ Holdings in 2004, Mitsubishi Atomic Industry, a nuclear power company. Mitsubishi Chemical, the largest Japan-based chemicals company Mitsubishi Power Systems, during the Second World War, Mitsubishi manufactured military aircraft under the direction of Dr. Jiro Horikoshi. The Mitsubishi A6M was a primary Japanese naval fighter in World War II and it was used by Imperial Japanese Navy pilots throughout the war, including in kamikaze attacks during the later stages. Allied pilots were astounded by its maneuverability, and it was successful in combat until the Allies devised tactics to utilize their advantage in armor. Mitsubishi made use of forced labor during this tenure, laborers included allied POWs, as well as Chinese citizens. In the post-war period, lawsuits and demands for compensations were presented against the Mitsubishi Corporation, on July 24,2015, the company agreed to formally apologize for this wartime labor, and compensated 3765 Chinese laborers who were conscripted to Mitsubishi Mining during the war. On July 19,2015, the company apologized for using American soldiers as slave laborers during World War II, Mitsubishi was involved in the opium trade in China during this period. Mitsubishi was among a number of major Japanese companies targeted for dissolution during the occupation of Japan and it was broken up into a large number of smaller enterprises whose stock was offered to the public
8.
Nokia
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Nokia Corporation, stylised as NOKIA, is a Finnish multinational communications and information technology company, founded in 1865. Nokia is headquartered in Espoo, Uusimaa, in the greater Helsinki metropolitan area, in 2014, Nokia employed 61,656 people across 120 countries, did business in more than 150 countries and reported annual revenues of around €12.73 billion. Nokia is a limited company listed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange. It is the worlds 274th-largest company measured by 2013 revenues according to the Fortune Global 500 and is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index, the company has had various industries in its 151-year history. It was founded as a mill, and now focuses on large-scale telecommunications infrastructures. Nokias dominance also extended into the industry through its Symbian platform. Nokia eventually entered into a pact with Microsoft in 2011 to exclusively use Microsofts Windows Phone platform on future smartphones and its mobile phone business was eventually bought by Microsoft in an overall deal totaling $7.17 billion. Stephen Elop, Nokias former CEO, and several other joined the new Microsoft Mobile subsidiary of Microsoft as part of the deal. Nokia has a history, dating back to 1865 when Fredrik Idestam. A second pulp mill was created in 1868 near the town of Nokia, in 1871, Idestam together with friend Leo Mechelin formed a shared company and called it Nokia, after the town of the second pulp mill. For the next 90 years, Nokia on its own would be a forest and power industry company, in 1922, Nokia was jointly-owned with a trio partnership with Finnish Cable Works and Finnish Rubber Works. Nokia Corporation now boasted many industries including rubber, forestry, cable, electricity, in the 1970s, the newly formed conglomerate started entering the networking and radio industry. Nokia also started making military equipment for Finlands defence forces, such as the Sanomalaite M/90 communicator in 1983, in 1979, Nokia went into a joint venture with television maker Salora, to create Mobira, which would lay out the foundation of Nokias future mobile phone division. In 1981, Mobira launched the Nordic Mobile Telephone service, the worlds first international cellular network, then in 1982, Mobira launched the Mobira Senator car phone, which can be considered as Nokias first mobile phone. At that time, though, Nokia had no interest at all in mobile phones and it is only due to the Salo, Finland-based Salora-Mobira that the idea was pushed through. In 1987, Finnish Cable Works discontinued production of cables at its Helsinki factory, nokian Tyres, a tyre producer that was originally formed as a division of Finnish Rubber Works in 1932, split away from Nokia Corporation in 1988. Two years later in 1990, Finnish Rubber Works followed suit and this allowed Nokia Corporation to solely focus on communications. Jorma Ollila became CEO in 1992, Nokias first fully portable mobile phone was the Mobira Cityman 900 in 1987
9.
Thailand
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Thailand, officially the Kingdom of Thailand, formerly known as Siam, is a country at the centre of the Indochinese peninsula in Southeast Asia. With a total area of approximately 513,000 km2, Thailand is the worlds 51st-largest country and it is the 20th-most-populous country in the world, with around 66 million people. The capital and largest city is Bangkok, Thailand is a constitutional monarchy and has switched between parliamentary democracy and military junta for decades, the latest coup being in May 2014 by the National Council for Peace and Order. Its capital and most populous city is Bangkok and its maritime boundaries include Vietnam in the Gulf of Thailand to the southeast, and Indonesia and India on the Andaman Sea to the southwest. The Thai economy is the worlds 20th largest by GDP at PPP and it became a newly industrialised country and a major exporter in the 1990s. Manufacturing, agriculture, and tourism are leading sectors of the economy and it is considered a middle power in the region and around the world. The country has always been called Mueang Thai by its citizens, by outsiders prior to 1949, it was usually known by the exonym Siam. The word Siam has been identified with the Sanskrit Śyāma, the names Shan and A-hom seem to be variants of the same word. The word Śyâma is possibly not its origin, but a learned, another theory is the name derives from Chinese, Ayutthaya emerged as a dominant centre in the late fourteenth century. The Chinese called this region Xian, which the Portuguese converted into Siam, the signature of King Mongkut reads SPPM Mongkut King of the Siamese, giving the name Siam official status until 24 June 1939 when it was changed to Thailand. Thailand was renamed Siam from 1945 to 11 May 1949, after which it reverted to Thailand. According to George Cœdès, the word Thai means free man in the Thai language, ratcha Anachak Thai means kingdom of Thailand or kingdom of Thai. Etymologically, its components are, ratcha, -ana- -chak, the Thai National Anthem, written by Luang Saranupraphan during the extremely patriotic 1930s, refers to the Thai nation as, prathet Thai. The first line of the anthem is, prathet thai ruam lueat nuea chat chuea thai, Thailand is the unity of Thai flesh. There is evidence of habitation in Thailand that has been dated at 40,000 years before the present. Similar to other regions in Southeast Asia, Thailand was heavily influenced by the culture and religions of India, Thailand in its earliest days was under the rule of the Khmer Empire, which had strong Hindu roots, and the influence among Thais remains even today. Voretzsch believes that Buddhism must have been flowing into Siam from India in the time of the Indian Emperor Ashoka of the Maurya Empire, later Thailand was influenced by the south Indian Pallava dynasty and north Indian Gupta Empire. The Menam Basin was originally populated by the Mons, and the location of Dvaravati in the 7th century, the History of the Yuan mentions an embassy from the kingdom of Sukhothai in 1282
10.
Microprocessor
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A microprocessor is a computer processor which incorporates the functions of a computers central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. Microprocessors contain both combinational logic and sequential digital logic, Microprocessors operate on numbers and symbols represented in the binary numeral system. The integration of a whole CPU onto a chip or on a few chips greatly reduced the cost of processing power. Integrated circuit processors are produced in numbers by highly automated processes resulting in a low per unit cost. Single-chip processors increase reliability as there are many electrical connections to fail. As microprocessor designs get better, the cost of manufacturing a chip generally stays the same, before microprocessors, small computers had been built using racks of circuit boards with many medium- and small-scale integrated circuits. Microprocessors combined this into one or a few large-scale ICs, the internal arrangement of a microprocessor varies depending on the age of the design and the intended purposes of the microprocessor. Advancing technology makes more complex and powerful chips feasible to manufacture, a minimal hypothetical microprocessor might only include an arithmetic logic unit and a control logic section. The ALU performs operations such as addition, subtraction, and operations such as AND or OR, each operation of the ALU sets one or more flags in a status register, which indicate the results of the last operation. The control logic retrieves instruction codes from memory and initiates the sequence of operations required for the ALU to carry out the instruction, a single operation code might affect many individual data paths, registers, and other elements of the processor. As integrated circuit technology advanced, it was feasible to manufacture more and more complex processors on a single chip, the size of data objects became larger, allowing more transistors on a chip allowed word sizes to increase from 4- and 8-bit words up to todays 64-bit words. Additional features were added to the architecture, more on-chip registers sped up programs. Floating-point arithmetic, for example, was not available on 8-bit microprocessors. Integration of the point unit first as a separate integrated circuit and then as part of the same microprocessor chip. Occasionally, physical limitations of integrated circuits made such practices as a bit slice approach necessary, instead of processing all of a long word on one integrated circuit, multiple circuits in parallel processed subsets of each data word. With the ability to put large numbers of transistors on one chip and this CPU cache has the advantage of faster access than off-chip memory, and increases the processing speed of the system for many applications. Processor clock frequency has increased more rapidly than external memory speed, except in the recent past, a microprocessor is a general purpose system. Several specialized processing devices have followed from the technology, A digital signal processor is specialized for signal processing, graphics processing units are processors designed primarily for realtime rendering of 3D images
11.
SuperH
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SuperH is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computing instruction set architecture developed by Hitachi and currently produced by Renesas. It is implemented by microcontrollers and microprocessors for embedded systems, as of 2015, many of the original patents for the SuperH architecture are expiring and the SH2 CPU has been reimplemented as open source hardware under the name J2. The SuperH processor core family was first developed by Hitachi in the early 1990s, Hitachi has developed a complete group of upward compatible instruction set CPU cores. The SH-1 and the SH-2 were used in the Sega Saturn and these cores have 16-bit instructions for better code density than 32-bit instructions, which was a great benefit at the time, due to the high cost of main memory. A few years later the SH-3 core was added to the SH CPU family, new features included another interrupt concept, a management unit. The SH-3 core also got a DSP extension, then called SH-3-DSP, with extended data paths for efficient DSP processing, special accumulators and a dedicated MAC-type DSP engine, this core was unifying the DSP and the RISC processor world. A derivative was also used with the original SH-2 core, between 1994 and 1996,35.1 million SuperH devices were shipped worldwide. For the Dreamcast, Hitachi developed the SH-4 architecture, superscalar instruction execution and a vector floating point unit were the highlights of this architecture. SH-4 based standard chips were introduced around 1998, the SH-3 and SH-4 architectures support both big-endian and little-endian byte ordering. Hitachi and STMicroelectronics started collaborating as early as 1997 on the design of the SH-4, in 2003, Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric formed a joint-venture called Renesas Technology, with Hitachi controlling 55% of it. In 2004, Renesas Technology bought STMicroelectronicss share of ownership in the SuperH Inc. Renesas Technology later became Renesas Electronics, following their merger with NEC Electronics. The SH-5 design supported two modes of operation, sHcompact mode is equivalent to the user-mode instructions of the SH-4 instruction set. SHmedia mode is different, using 32-bit instructions with sixty-four 64-bit integer registers. In SHmedia mode the destination of a branch is loaded into a branch register separately from the branch instruction. This allows the processor to prefetch instructions for a branch without having to snoop the instruction stream, however, SH-5 differs because its backward compatibility mode is the 16-bit encoding rather than the 32-bit encoding. The evolution of the SuperH architecture still continues, the last of the SH-2 patents expired in 2014. At LinuxCon Japan 2015, j-core developers presented a cleanroom reimplemention of the SH-2 ISA with extensions, subsequently, a design walkthrough was presented at ELC2016. The open source BSD licensed VHDL code for the J2 core has been proven on Xilinx FPGAs and on ASICs manufactured on TSMCs 180 nm process, additional instructions are easy to add
