Renesas Electronics announces 32 new microcontrollers

According to Renesas, the mcus contribute to reduced system power consumption and higher performance for automotive control systems such as keyless entry, power window control and mirror control. The mcus are the first group of devices in the company's F Series of automotive products in the new RL78 family. Renesas claims the range features industry leading low power consumption and high performance. The devices combine the technologies of its main existing products in the 8/16bit mcu market, the 78K (78K0 and 78K0R) and R8C. They also integrate a set of peripheral functions around the RL78 cpu core which is based on the low power/high performance 78K0R cpu core. The new RL78/F12 MCUs include functions that support internal flash memory with capacities from 8 to 64KB; packages from 20 to 64pins; and the LIN specification, which has become the standard in car network. Power consumption has been reduced with an operating current of 70µA/MHz (at 32MHz for basic operations) and standby current of 0.6µA during normal operation, which is about 10% that of previous Renesas products. The MCUs also achieve a cpu performance of 41.6DMIPS at 32MHz (1.6 times the performance of earlier Renesas products). Manufactured in a 130nm process, the RL78/F12 products achieve a reduction of about half the power consumption of the earlier Renesas 78K0R/Fx3 and R8C/3x products.