Renesas Electronics – MCU Overview

Renesas Electronics is a major supplier of microcontrollers to the world-wide electronics industry with  MCUs to support most application areas including industrial, consumer and automotive products.

A full line-up of MCUs covering all 8bit to 32bit requirements is available today with a comprehensive range of peripheral functions including USB and Ethernet applications, in addition Renesas supports HMI/ Multimedia solutions with high end MPU devices.

True Low Power  MCUs

For very low power applications Renesas has developed the RL78 Family of 16bit MCUs – this product family spans applications requiring  8bit to 16bit performance and has been derived from the previously very popular  Renesas Technology R8C and NEC 78K products combining the features of both and achieving improved very low power consumption and high performance.   The RL78 includes an innovative low power  “snooze mode” that can achieve a further 30% reduction in power  but can wake from  ADC / UART.



This MCU family has an extensive lineup and will offer over 300 devices from 20pins to 128pins with full compatability and memory  from 2KB to 128KB of embedded flash. High integration and safety features are included with IEC60730 support, low voltage detection on chip, accurate on chip oscillator and a temperature range from -20C to 105C.  A full roadmap is offered with support for industrial motor control applications, LCD drivers and high performance analogue peripherals.

32 Bit High Perfromance MCUs

Where extreme  MCU performance is required the Renesas RX family has been developed to provide a fully scalable solution for demanding applications.  The 32-bit RX central processing unit uses an Enhanced Harvard bus 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.

RX offers CPU performance up to 1.65DMIPS/MHZ,  floating point unit and DSP with  fast 100MHz embedded flash memory.  Designed with efficiency in mind 130uA/DMIP is achievable with 1.3uA RTC standby this is suitable for battery operated applications. Significant code size reductions can be achieved with this novel architecture and  IEC60730 safety comes as standard.

Two key product ranges, currently make up the RX platform. At the high end the RX600 100MHz MCU with 100MHz flash memory - no wait state operation; operation from 2.7V; and integration of many types of preipherals such as CAN, USB, Ethernet MAC, powerful 16bit timers and 12bit ADC are some of the options.

Extending the platform concept to applications demanding lower power with high 32bit performance Renesas has introduced the RX200 range.  Also no slouch with up to 50MHz MCU perfromance, 1.56DMIPS/MHz and including Renesas MONOS no wait state flash memory. The RX200 can operate from 1.62V and achieve 0.21MA/DMIP power with standby current of down to 0.3uA. As with the big brother RX600 a cache of peripherals can be offered – up to 9 serial interfaces, 12bit ADC, temp.  sensor, RTC and powerful 16bit timers.   Offered in a range of packages from 48 to 144 pin and up to 1MB of embedded flash.

Development and Evaluation Tools

Available for all Renesas MCUs is a comprehensive development environment.    Evaluation starts with a RPB – a small board that enables evaluation of programmes, includes an IAR “Kickstart” licence and offers basic debugging features.   

Following  this Renesas provides a starter kit – agains with the IAR  “Kickstart” licence but including a “E1” debugging  tool and samples peripheral codes.  Designers can choose development environnments from IAR or Renesas ( E² Studio) and a choice of compilers,  also  with free tool options including GNU, free operating systems such as FreeRTOS and free comms stacks for USB, CAN, TCP/IP etc.

Renesas Ecosystem

World-wide Renesas has one of the largest ecosystems available, over 700 alliance partners,  with for example specialists in motor control that work closely with the Renesas specialists to produce application boards. And also a large pan-European field applications team and expert applications engineers.

Part of this Ecosystem are the on-line communities from Renesas offering user forums for technical support and online training.