Renesas Electronics America announces V850 MCU demo platform for Continua-certified blood glucose meter agent

SANTA CLARA, USA: Renesas Electronics America Inc., a premier provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, announced the availability of a Continua demonstration platform based on the Renesas Electronics V850 energy-efficient microcontroller (MCU) with certified Continua Blood Glucose agent software.

Implementing a blood glucose meter as defined by the Continua Health Alliance, the platform shows how the V850 MCUs implement complete software functionality at a level of power efficiency that ensures long battery life. As medical devices such as blood glucose meters gain enhanced connectivity in compliance with Continua guidelines, the energy-efficient V850 MCUs, at about 350uA/DMIPS with up to 1 megabyte (MB) of flash memory and integrated USB function support, make it possible to handle the added software load without sacrificing the long battery life that end users have come to expect.

Low-power, high-performance microcontrollers enable Continua healthcare devices to store time-stamped measurements and automatically send the data to healthcare professionals. By eliminating the error-prone process of manually collecting such measurement data, Continua devices help improve the quality of medical data and the diagnosis.

The challenge in implementing these devices is that collecting and communicating the data adds a significant software burden to existing medical products. This software burden could become a human burden if the people who use these devices every day have to replace batteries frequently.

The Renesas Electronics 32-bit V850ES/Jx3-L MCUs relieve this burden with an extraordinarily high energy efficiency — 1.9 DMIPS/MHz — which enables the V850 devices to process more than other MCUs at a lower frequency. In addition to minimizing power consumption, low-frequency operation reduces the possibility of electromagnetic interference (EMI). With up to 1 MB of flash memory, the V850 devices have plenty of capacity to accommodate evolving standards for connected portable medical devices. The V850 MCUs also integrate USB support and a variety of other peripheral functions.