Renesas Electronics packs RX punch into smaller package to support cost-sensitive industrial and consumer apps

SANTA CLARA, USA: Renesas Electronics America, a leading provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, announced the availability of 12 new microcontrollers (MCUs) in the high-performance RX631 Group. The new devices bring the outstanding 1.65 Dhrystone MIPS (DMips) performance and advanced connectivity features of the RX631 MCUs in smaller 64- and 48-pin packages with smaller flash memory footprints of 256KB, 384KB and 512KB to serve cost and space constrained applications.

Pin-to-pin and software compatible with others in the RX631 MCU Group, the new devices provide true single-chip solutions for demanding industrial applications such as building and factory automation, medical monitoring and therapy equipment, security and fire alarm systems, climate control, home appliances, communication gateways and point-of-sale devices. Moreover, thanks to the lower pin count and memory footprint, the new MCUs are also now suited to address consumer application like in gaming, PC peripherals, fitness and consumer medical application.

“We are seeing increased demand for solutions that will enable people to interact with their electronics devices more efficiently and conveniently whether at home or at work,” said Ritesh Tyagi, senior director, MCU Products, Renesas Electronics America. “By combining the high performance 165 DMIPS at 100 MHz operation of RX with built-in anti temper feature and USB connectivity in a small, inexpensive package, we can enable RX631 MCUs for a whole new range of consumer and industrial applications.”

The 32-bit RX central processing unit uses an enhanced Harvard architecture with separate instruction and operand busses going to both Flash and SRAM enabling simultaneous instruction fetch and memory writes which boosts performance and is ideal for bandwidth intensive applications such as digital signal processing. Instructions are fed into the CPU from 100MHz Flash and are processed by a 5-stage execution pipeline enabling single clock operations.

The CPU also integrates a single precision 32-bit floating point unit, which performs complex non-linear math in fewer clock cycles, reduces code and data size, and simplifies code development. The multiply accumulate unit enables efficient digital signal processing. The RX register set consists of nine control registers, sixteen 32-bit general purpose registers, and a 48-bit accumulator register. There is a memory protection unit. The interrupt control unit enables ultra fast 5-cycle interrupt latency.