New RX230 Offers Support for Cost-Sensitive Industrial and Consumer Applications
Renesas Electronics Europe, a premier provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced the new RX230 Group of 32-bit microcontrollers (MCUs), which offers an optimal combination of high performance with digital signal processing (DSP) and floating point unit (FPU), and low power consumption. With 1.8V to 5.5V supply, the RX230 Group is ideal for applications that require high processing performance in environments with low current supply capacity – a key requirement in several industrial and consumer applications – as well as the robustness needed in home appliance applications.
Compared to the existing RX231 Group, the RX230 is optimized with regard to embedded flash size and feature. This covers the requirements of cost-sensitive industrial and consumer applications who not require USB nor CAN interfaces in their application design and require 256kB Flash or less for their code, at a maximum of large 32kB embedded RAM.
The RX230 Group can handle high processing loads, such as eliminating noise from digital signals and performing floating-point calculations, by using Renesas’ powerful 32-bit RXv2 CPU core with DSP/FPU operation capabilities. As a result, the system power consumption is not only reduced by applying the latest Renesas process technologies, but also by reducing the CPU frequency and boosting the processing speed at the same time. The RXv2 CPU core as implemented on the RX230 achieves a performance benchmark score of 4.16 CoreMark/MHz, which is leading edge in its class. In addition, the RX230 achieves top-class power performances in standby at only 0.8 μA, which enables system manufacturers to extend system operation on battery power.
Key Features of the RX230 Group of MCUs:
- Excellent power efficiency through optimized combination of low-power leadership and high performance
The RXv2 CPU core achieves a performance benchmark score of 4.16 CoreMark/MHz, combined with the operating speeds of 54 MHz, as well as an approximately fourfold increase in DSP performance and sixfold in FPU performance. As a result, the new MCUs significantly reduce the time required for high-processing load tasks such as digital filtering.
The RX230 Group achieves the industry-leading low power consumption of only 0.8 µA in standby mode, while retaining the contents of both SRAM and CPU registers. The RX230 Group can recover from standby mode in a minimum of 5 µs, which makes it possible to reduce current loss during the recovery and allow the application to react quickly to external events. Applications can be executed from flash after this time, and analog functions, such as the analog-to-digital converter, are available for use.
The RX230 Group also supports an additional low power timer (LPT), which only consumes an additional 0.4 µA and allows the system manufacturer to program the device to wake up from the low power modes with a very wide range of possible timings, minimizing current consumption in many different applications.
- High-sensitivity touch key functionality
The RX230 Group provides proven capacitive touch sensor capabilities equipped with Renesas’ second-generation capacitive touch technology.
Up to 24 touch keys in a 100-pin package and down to 6 touch keys in 48-pin package are provided for a self-capacitance mode operation. Using the mutual capacitance mode, the RX230 MCUs can support up to 64 keys, and combines high sensitivity with a high level of noise tolerance. The RX230 detects touches even when the panel is wet or when the operator is wearing gloves, which creates highly flexible user interfaces in terms of usage environment and device design.
- Designed for safety
Compliance with international safety standards is important in industrial automation, home appliance and electrical control applications. The RX230 MCUs offer extensive hardware-based safety features for UL and IEC60730, including self-diagnostic and disconnect-detection monitoring for the on-chip A/D converter; a clock frequency accuracy measurement circuit; an independent watchdog timer, and a built-in hardware memory test to spot anomalies in the internal RAM.
- Designed for robustness
The RX230 Group enables operation from a single 1.8V to 5.5V power supply, which allows system manufacturers to design robust applications and minimizes their concerns about the signal-to-noise ratio. Moreover, the RX230 offers not only operation, but also reprogramming and erasing of the flash memory over the whole supply voltage range, which ensures an easy and cost optimized application design. The broadly scalable power supply concept therefore ensures that the RX230 is an ideal fit for home appliance and industrial application requirements.
