Renesas Electronics first to achieve UL certification of hardware safety features for UL 60730-1 compliance

USA: Renesas Electronics America announced that its RL78 MCU Family has received certification for the UL60730 standard for its hardware safety features.

The RL78 family of MCUs is designed to deliver performance and power-efficiency while incorporating advanced on-chip peripherals, enabling customers to build compact and energy-efficient systems at lower cost. This value paired with the extensive support for safety standards makes the products ideal for appliance applications such as white goods.

“As embedded systems become more interconnected and interdependent, requirements for safety compliance are increasing for many markets, such as appliances, industrial automation, automotive and medical,” said Ritesh Tyagi, senior director, Marketing, Renesas Electronics America Inc. “Safety is becoming an essential characteristic of all smart systems. With pre-certified MCUs, designers can focus on system-level certification, facilitating the creation of products that help enable the Smart Society.”

“UL is committed to meeting the business needs of all component manufacturers in the safety supply chain for safety critical systems and sub-systems. This certification gives OEMs the confidence that an RL78 MCU has built-in hardware features to help them meet the functional safety requirements corresponding to Class B control functions,” said Doug Lockard, Global Director - Appliances for UL LLC.

“More simply put, when designing a safety related control in an application that requires UL60730-1 compliance, the fact that UL has already determined that these hardware features comply with Class B requirements will greatly reduce design time and effort in every downstream link in the supply chain.”

The UL60730 safety standard certifies several RL78 hardware features, including: the Window Watchdog Timer (WDT) circuit, the RAM Parity Error Check detection circuit, the CRC circuit, the RAM/SFR Guard Circuit, and the A/D Self-test circuit. These safety features help engineers reduce design complexity by minimizing software overhead that is typically required by self-test routines.

This translates to less code and lower memory requirements for self-testing, and more deterministic product performance. Integrated safety hardware also reduces overall system costs because no external components such as watchdog timer (WDT), or references for analog circuit testing are required.