Renesas Electronics intros V850 MCU series

TOKYO, JAPAN: Renesas Electronics Corp. announced the development of the V850E2/Fx4-L series with 19 new 32-bit microcontrollers (MCUs).

Designed for the automotive comfort and body segment, the low-power MCUs offer scalability and compatibility combined with sophisticated peripheral functions to provide premium automotive body solutions for applications such as roof or window lifters, door-, seat- and light modules, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) and body control modules.

The new V850-based MCU series enables very low current consumption in active mode of less than 0.35 milliamps (mA) at 1 megahertz (MHz). The V850E2/Fx4-L MCUs provide a unique power-saving feature called the sequencer (SEQ). The SEQ supports hardware monitoring of digital inputs in deep stop mode without any usage of the CPU or memory.

When the SEQ detects activities at the digital inputs, the device switches from deep stop mode to run mode. A further unique feature is the LIN-master controller (LMA) which supports the automatic LIN-frame detection without CPU interactivity.

The new, low-power V850E2/Fx4-L MCUs combine and extend the legacy technologies of the two merged companies, NEC Electronics and Renesas Technology: the V850 32-bit RISC CPU and the power-saving MONOS (metal oxide nitride oxide silicon) flash technology employing 90-nanometer (nm) process technology of the RX and SH MCU families.

The V850E2/Fx4-L MCUs incorporate a maximum CPU clock from 48 MHz up to 64 MHz with a performance of 1.81 Dhrystone MIPS (DMIPS)/MHz. With the adoption of AUTOSAR and increased system functionality, there is growing demand for larger memory capacity.

The V850E2/Fx4-L MCUs address this demand by providing flash memory ranges from 256 kilobytes (KB) up to 1.5 megabytes (MB) equipped in packages with pin counts ranging from 64 to 176. An enhanced peripheral set is implemented, including PWM generation,
up to two CAN interfaces as well as 8 DMA (direct memory access) channels.

Fully-verified AUTOSAR MCAL (microcontroller abstraction layer) software drivers are scheduled to be prepared. Renesas' MCAL software drivers can be obtained as a stand-alone software package or integrated in a complete basic software stack in cooperation with partner companies. To comply with the AUTOSAR requirements, new system protection functionality (SPF) has been implemented in all V850E2/Fx4-L devices. The SPF includes a memory protection unit (MPU) and a system register protection (SRP).

Samples of Renesas' new V850E2/Fx4-L MCUs are available now priced at $20 per unit. Mass production is scheduled to begin in the beginning of CY2013 and is expected to reach a volume of 1,500,000 units per month in December 2013.