Renesas adds three dozen 16-bit MCUs to R8C/tiny series

San Jose, Calif.—Renesas Technology America Inc. has added 36 new 16-bit microcontrollers (MCUs) to the R8C/Tiny product line, giving automotive system engineers a choice of 72 devices optimized for in-vehicle body-control applications.

The MCUs in the 80-pin R8C/38E, 64-pin R8C/36E, and 48-pin R8C/34E product groups have on-chip flash memory, a built-in precision clock oscillator, and enhanced functionality, as well as packages with extra I/O pins. Moreover, within each of these three groups, there are MCUs with or without a CAN1 (controller area network) interface, with various amounts of flash ROM and RAM (32KB/2.5KB, 48KB/4KB, and 64KB/6KB), and with or without on-chip 4KB of data flash2 (data storage flash memory).

Versions of the chips are available in two operating temperature ranges: standard (-40 to +85°C) and extended (-40 to +125°C) and the MCUs can be shipped with the flash blank or pre-programmed with customer-supplied user code.

The MCUs in the R8C/38E/36E/34E groups provide improvements in various on-chip peripheral functions. For example, the high-speed on-chip oscillator has improved oscillation precision: ±1%. This feature eliminates the external resonator that would otherwise be needed to implement the clock circuit, enabling system cost reductions while also helping to boost reliability. The data flash built into some of the new R8C/Tiny models eliminates the need for external EEPROM (electrically erasable and programmable read only memory) for data storage. It now has a background-operation (BGO) function that allows the CPU to execute instructions during data flash reading or writing. This boosts the MCU's processing efficiency and also allows system engineers to write programs without concern for data flash read/write times, simplifying program development. The size of the data flash capacity has been doubled to a total of 4KB (1KB - 4 blocks) compared with previous products, so more data can be stored.

Pricing: Ranges between $3.50 to $6.40.
Availability: Third quarter of 2008.
Specifications: Click here.

Renesas Technology Corp., www.renesas.com