Renesas Electronics America announces low-power 32-bit MCUs with up to 1MB flash memory and low-power demonstrator give-away promotion

SANTA CLARA, USA: Renesas Electronics America Inc., a premier provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced the availability of its eight new 32-bit V850 microcontrollers (MCUs) in the existing V850 J Series.

These new V850ES/Jx3-L MCUs are an extension of the successful low-power V850ES/Jx3-L 32-bit MCUs that were introduced in early 2010 and are designed for low-power, portable applications with high-density memory from 768 kilobytes (KB) flash/80KB RAM to 1 megabyte (MB) flash/80KB RAM to support increasing memory demand.

The new MCUs achieve industry-leading, low power consumption with built-in large capacity memory, and four of these high memory-density MCUs are equipped with a USB 2.0 function interface to support communications. To demonstrate the low-power capability, Renesas Electronics America is offering a give-away promotion of a V850ES/Jx3-L Low Power Demonstrator Kit, which enables users to measure current consumption of different MCU operation modes and illustrates many features supporting low-power system design.

Ideal for applications such as portable healthcare equipment and healthcare systems, especially portable measurement and monitor devices such as blood glucose meters, can take advantage of the low power to extend battery life and utilize the large flash memory for data storage and increasing application needs. USB support enables healthcare systems to support patient-doctor information exchanges, like what the Continua Alliance standard provides. Moreover, the 32-bit processing power can support graphic computation for different displays from segmented LCD to dot-matrix and OLED.

Software complexity continues to increase in many applications. Product designers are faced with difficult design decisions such as extending a design cycle to reducing software size or paying for extra external memory to shorten design time. The high-density Flash memory eliminates this design dilemma as Renesas Electronics’ V850 MCUs with up to 1MB Flash memory can support many applications without resorting to external memory.

In conjunction with the product announcement, Renesas Electronics America is offering a give-away promotion for a V850ES/Jx3-L Low Power Demonstrator. This kit utilizes a V850ES/JG3-L MCU with 512KB of Flash memory to provide a platform that demonstrates the different standby modes. The kit supports current consumption measurements with the use of an ampere meter, and also demonstrates RAM retention and real-time clock operation in the lowest power mode.