Press Releases for Europe 

London, 19th June 2008 -- Renesas Technology Europe today announced availability of the latest application specific standard products (ASSP) in its R8C/Tiny series of high performance 16-bit microcontrollers. In additional to over 260 general purpose (GP) devices, the R8C/Tiny series now has several ASSPs, that offer solutions for low end motor control, lighting and small appliances. Four groups of devices have been launched, the R8C/2E-2F and the R8C/2K-2L.

The R8C/2E and /2F are 32-pin devices, offering 8KB or 16KB flash memory. They feature a comprehensive range of analogue functions such as A/D and D/A converters, dual-channel comparators, Serial UART I/O and both 8-bit and 16-bit timers. Andreas Bier, product marketing manager for Renesas’ R8C family in Europe comments, “With an A/D conversion of around 3.3µs/channel and a 200ns comparator, these devices are ideal for motor control, ballast, lighting control and any other application that requires a lot of analogue functions on one chip.”

The R8C/2K and /2L group features have been optimised for low-end motor control designs that require a small package size, and 8KB or 16KB flash. The devices are also ideal for any applications that require a lot of pulse width modulation (PWM). Two timers provide up to 9 x 16-bit PWM capability. Featuring one 16bit Timer RC with input capture/output compare function and a 3-phase 16bit Timer RD PWM output, providing modulation in complementary mode and automatic dead time insertions, the devices are ideally suited to driving brushless DC motors.

Both ASSP series have a range of fail-safe functions such as clock stop detection, and detect over current, special function register protection and a watchdog timer with independent on chip oscillator. These ensure the end-system application is more reliable. In addition to flash memory, the R8C/2F and R8C/2L devices have 2 x 1KB block of data flash. These are suitable to store data like calibration parameters or to have additional program capacities.
In addition to the well know R8C features, it offers serial interface, dedicated LIN driver, embedded power on reset (POR) and low voltage detection circuits (LVD) and two internal high/low oscillators. The high speed 40 MHz on-chip oscillator has an excellent accuracy of +/- 3% over the whole range of operating temperature and can be calibrated by software down to 1%.

Both ASSPs devices are now available. For development customers, they can continue to use the E8a emulator, which supports the on-chip debugging via the 1-pin interface (MODE pin). The 1-pin interface has the advantage that all I/O pins are available during debugging. In addition it can be used as a flash memory writer. The motor control device, R8C/2K-2L, gets additional trace and real time debugging support from the compact emulator (CPE).