Realizes Higher Performance and Less Power Consumption in a Compact Single-Chip Design Targeting Factory Automation Systems, Industrial Drives, Printers and Home Appliances
Renesas Electronics, a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced the availability of two new 32-bit All Flash microcontrollers (MCUs) - µPD70F3514 and µPD70F3515, with processing performance of 1024 Dhrystone MIPS at a clock speed of 200 megahertz (MHz), the world’s highest among the existing 32-bit dual-core MCUs with embedded flash memory. The new MCUs have two built-in CPU core, 64 kilobytes (KB) of random access memory (RAM) available for each core, 2 megabytes (MB) of flash memory and an additional 64KB system RAM are available in a 304-pin fine pitch ball grid array (FBGA) package. Renesas Electronics’ new MCUs, share the following features: (1) Integration of two V850E2M 32-bit CPU cores; (2) Up to 2 megabytes (MB) of flash memory; (3) Expanded peripheral functions including USB, CAN and Ethernet interface as well as increased number of channels for conventional peripherals such as timers and serial interfaces. In addition two single core V850E2M MCUs with up to 1MB flash memory and one built-in V850E2M core are also available.
Recently, manufacturing systems are becoming increasingly highly-precise, faster and more complex to boost the manufacturing capacity of the plants and more complex, MCUs integrated in factory automation (FA) systems, such as motion drives, servo drives and inverters, are required to provide higher performance. In the meantime, it is also important to provide compact MCUs with less power consumption to meet the growing consumer demand for environmentally friendly products.
In addition to FA systems, home appliances including TVs and refrigerators with network connectivity, and home equipment including digital interphones and fire receivers require high-speed communication between the devices using wide-ranging interfaces such as CAN, USB and Ethernet.
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To address these growing demands, Renesas Electronics developed the new MCUs with the following main features:
(1) Incorporates two 32-bit CPU cores with the world's highest performance
By enhancing the pipeline structure of the company's existing V850E2 CPU core, Renesas Electronics has strengthened the parallel processing capability required for demanding environments and successfully developed the V850E2M core with high processing performance of 2.56 Dhrystone MIPS per MHz per core, increased by 1.4 times from the company's previous V850E2 core. By using two V850E2M cores, system designers can employ the world's highest processing performance of 1024 DMIPS at a clock speed of 200 MHz while still maintaining low power consumption of 0.88 milliwats (mW) per Dhrystone MIPS, which is 60 percent less compared to using only one core. In addition, the V850E2M CPU core extends its floating point units (FPUs) to facilitate greater accuracy and range in floating point numbers, making it suitable for information appliances that require high-speed data processing or complex algorithm calculations.
(2) Large capacity and high-speed flash memory
The new MCUs incorporate up to 2 MB of flash memory fabricated through scaled-down, high-speed 90 nanometer (nm) process technology. In addition, the new MCUs include flash memory caches for each CPU core that are capable of single-cycle access at 200 MHz, contributing to improvement of overall system speed.
(3) Expanded peripheral functions
In addition to the newly added CAN, USB (Host and Function) and Ethernet interfaces, the new MCUs offer an extensive lineup of peripheral functions, including dramatically increased number of channels for the timers and serial interfaces. The rich lineup of peripheral functions makes it possible for system designers to reduce the number of off-chip components, save board space, and realize compact systems at lower cost. Two external memory busses are also provided to facilitate the development process for ASICs and external memory, contributing to higher performance.
(4) Extensive software development environment lineup
Renesas Electronics will provide system designers with optimal multicore development environments supporting asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP).
In addition, Prism, a multi core software development analysis environment, which allows software engineers to easily assess and realize the full potential of multi core processors without the need to change the source code or run additional simulations, is available from CriticalBlue, a provider of embedded multi core software analysis tools.
System designers can choose either MCU with a single-core or dual-core; each MCU employing Renesas Electronics' state-of-the-art V850E2M CPU core with robust processing capability. Renesas Electronics believes these new MCUs will contribute to development of competitive systems for the fields of FA, Industrial drives, printers and home appliances.
