Press Releases for Europe 

26th February 2008 - Embedded World 2008 -- Renesas Technology Europe today announced a major expansion of its popular M16C Platform microcontroller*1 lineup with the addition of 20 different models in the M16C/65 group. These devices, successors to the M16C/62P family and extensions of the M16C/64 group, are fully compatible with previous products.

The M16C/65 series operate between 2.7V to 5.5V and utilise the high-performance, M16C/60 16-bit CISC CPU core. Running at speeds up to 32 MHz, they are 30% faster than current family devices. New features include a power-on reset (POR) function, a low-voltage detection (LVD) circuit, real-time clock (RTC), and high-precision (40MHz) on-chip oscillator, a low-voltage detection (LVD) circuit and a watchdog timer with an independent oscillator (125kHz). A hardware multi-master I²C-bus has also been added in place of the simplified I²C-bus.

In addition, on-chip peripheral functions have been improved to include a fast A/D converter, 6 USART, 2 SIO, CRC unit and 4 DMA controllers. The 10-bit A/D converter achieves a fast conversion speed of 1.72 μs and offers 26 channels. The devices are available with on-chip Flash and RAM memory in density combinations of 128kB/12kB, 256kB/20kB, 512kB/31kB and 768kB/47kB. The ICs also have an extra flash memory for data storage. A bank of 8kB DataFlash*2, with an endurance of 10,000 cycles in both read and write operations, as well as a bank of 16kB to store a customised boot-loader are included.

“The integrated peripherals, ease-of-use and compatibility to previous M16C/62P products, along with their attractive price makes them an easy choice for engineers.” said Bernd Westhoff, Product Marketing of the Renesas Technology Europe CID BU, “We believe the M16C/65 will meet every designer’s expectation for a 16-bit general purpose microcontroller. Further developments of the M16C/6x Platform will see as extensions of the current device with smaller packages, low voltage support and extended features like USB.”

The new E8a on-chip debugging emulator is available as a development environment. The E8a can also be used as a flash programmer. In addition, a new full-spec emulator E100 that supports M16C/64 and M16C/65 devices has recently been released.

The M16C/65 group is currently sampled to lead customers and samples will soon be generally available. Quantity pricing for a 100pin LQFP device is starting at 4.80 Euro.

Notes to editors

1. M16C Platform family are CISC microcontrollers, comprising a varied product lineup of 16-bit and 32-bit products in the M16C Series, M32C Series and R32C Series. Features include highly efficient C-language support, excellent noise characteristics, low power consumption, and comprehensive on-chip peripheral functions. The range of low-end to high-end series featuring the same architecture, pin assignment compatibility, and peripheral function upward-compatibility provides support for a wide range of application areas, including the automotive, industrial, and consumer fields
2. DataFlash is Renesas’ own flash memory for data storage.