RX631 MCUs in 48- and 64-pin packages target cost-sensitive applications

April 13, 2012 // Julien Happich

MSC now offers 12 new high-performance RX631 microcontrollers (MCUs) in 64- and 48-pin packages from Renesas Electronics. The new devices are particularly suited for compact and cost-sensitive industrial and consumer applications.

The MCUs are provided with 256 KB, 384 KB or 512 KB flash memory and achieve up to 165 DMIPS processing power at 100 MHz operation. At the same time, the new MCUs offer users a wide range of communication, timer and analog peripherals including USB 2.0 full-speed channel (Host, Device and OTG), CAN interface, 12 A/D converter channels, a 10-bit D/A converter and a real-time clock (RTC). Furthermore, the RX631 derivatives that come in a 64-pin LQFP package, provide a six-channel multi-function timer pulse unit 2 (MTU2) with complementary six-phase PWM, a six-channel timer pulse unit (TPU), a four-channel compare match timer (CMT), a four-channel timer (TMR) and dual watchdog timers. The RX631 derivatives also feature numerous serial data communication channels, six SCI, two SPI, and one I2C.

Four channels of DMA and a Data Transfer Controller make it easy to handle transfers with peripherals and ensure efficient use of the CPU. Many functional enhancements were made to reduce system costs and power consumption, including a Vbat pin for connection to a coin cell or super cap to automatically power the RTC and a tamper-detection system within the RTC to time stamp and store an intrusion event from three different, independent sources. The RX631 MCUs also feature an on-chip temperature sensor, on-chip 50 MHz oscillator to boot up a system at high speed and on-chip voltage reference for the A/D and D/A converters. Furthermore, thanks to an on-chip data flash with up to 100000 erase cycles and finer write/erase granularity at just 2-byte write and 32-byte erase, the need for an external EEPROM device is eliminated.

Developers are provided with a wide variety of hardware and software tools for design-in of the new RX631 MCUs. For example, the popular High-Performance Embedded Workshop (HEW) integrated development environment (IDE) from Renesas Electronics, which supports the low-cost E1 JTAG on-chip debugging tool as well as the comprehensive E20 high-speed trace on-chip debugging tool. The HEW IDE and Renesas Electronics' C/C++ compiler come with unlimited use for 60 days, and then the compiler size is limited to 128 KB thereafter.

Visit MSC Vertriebs GmbH at www.msc-ge.com

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