Renesas expands RX600 MCU series for network, industrial and smart metering apps

JAPAN: Renesas Electronics Corp. announced the expansion of its 32-bit RX microcontroller (MCU) platform, with the introduction of 120 new models for the successful RX631 and RX63N product groups within Renesas’ RX600 series of MCUs.

These new products in the RX63N/RX631 groups offer up to 256 KB embedded RAM, doubling today’s available RAM size of 128 KB. Thanks to the RX platform concept, these new products are pin-to-pin compatible with existing models, and therefore recommended as a drop-in replacement for customers with larger RAM requirements. By providing larger RAM the new devices allow developing complex applications that combine several middleware components like TCP-IP stacks and networking services, SSL and encryption, Graphic libraries and USB functions.

Typically, RX631/63N models with 256KB SRAM will be products of choice for developer wanting to take full advantage of “the power of Two” promotion that enable them to use any middleware component from Micrium when they choose RX for their design.

“Broad selection, device scalability and an attractive cost structure are important to helping designers meet the evolving requirements for their connected applications,” said Ritesh Tyagi, senior director, Microcontroller Products & Solutions Marketing, Renesas Electronics America Inc.

“The new RX63N/RX631 devices are the latest example of Renesas helping customers bring products to market quickly and cost effectively. Featuring our 90nm process technology and 256KB embedded RAM, the new MCUs are an ideal fit for smart meters and other industrial and networking applications that require large communication stacks in a single-chip solution without external memory considerations.”

Based on Renesas’ 90nm process technology, the new RX63N/RX631 groups achieve high performance of 165 DMIPS (Dhrystone [Note 1] MIPS) at 100 MHz CPU and flash operation. The new products offer a wide and scalable product extension from 1 MB to 2 MB flash integration by supporting 256 KB RAM for all of these product variations. In addition, all these products integrate 32 KB of E2 data flash memory that supports 100,000 rewrite cycles for easy data storage. The new devices are housed in an LQFP package, allowing Renesas to provide products appropriate for a wide variety of embedded equipment supporting 100 pins to 176 pins.

As a new feature, these RX63N/RX631 models integrate an optional Data Encryption Unit (DEU), which enables customers to use encryption/decryption functions according to the AES standard. The encryption engine supports AES (128, 192 and 256-bit key length).

The new MCUs share several features with the existing RX63N/RX631 groups, including up to three channels of Controller Area Network (CAN) 2.0B compliant interfaces, two Universal Serial Bus (USB) full speed hosts, USB OTG and device features and an Ethernet MAC IEEE 802.3 interface, compliant with Media Independent Interface (MII) and Reduced Media Independent Interface (RMII), for easy connection to a PHY (RX63N only).

The RX63N/RX631 groups of MCUs (excluding the 64- and 48-pin packages) also include an EXDMAC unit that can transfer data over an external bus independently of the internal bus occupation. This allows these MCUs to easily support TFT solutions for up to QVGA or WQVGA class TFT panels, even if there is no dedicated LCD controller used in the application.

These new devices also include a real-time clock (RTC) that reduces power consumption by offering 2 V real-time clock operations. The RTC module includes an anti-tamper detection function that independently detects system state changes with three pins, while the CPU is in the power off state and not operating. It also assigns timestamps.

The new RX63N/RX631 devices with 256 KB RAM will be available by December 2013 in mass production, with pricing ranging from $6.35 for 1MB Flash- 192KB SRAM in LQFP 100-pin package without CAN in 10K-unit quantities to $9.50 for 2MB Flash - 256KB SRAM in LQFP 176-pin package with CAN in 10K-unit quantities.