Renesas Technology Europe announces a major expansion of its popular M16C Platform microcontroller family. M16C 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. Lineup includes 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 2.7 V to 5.5 V and utilize the high-performance, M16C/60 16-bit CISC CPU core. Running at speeds up to 32MHz, they are 30% faster than current family devices. New features include a poweron reset (POR) function, a lowvoltage detection (LVD) circuit, real-time clock (RTC), and high-precision (40MHz) onchip oscillator, a low-voltage detection (LVD) circuit and a watchdog timer with an independent oscillator (125 kHz). 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 128 kB/12 kB, 256 kB/ 20 kB, 512 kB/31 kB and 768 kB/47 kB.

The ICs also have an extra flash memory for data storage. A bank of 8 kB DataFlash (DataFlash is Renesas’ own flash memory for data storage), with an endurance of 10,000 cycles in both read and write operations, as well as a bank of 16 kB to store a customized bootloader are included.

The integrated peripherals, ease-of-use and compatibility with previous M16C/62P products, along with their attractive price makes them an easy choice for engineers. Further developments of the M16C/6x Platform will see extensions of the current device with smaller packages, low voltage support down to 1.8 V, and extended peripheral 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 and samples are available at Sasco Holz. Sample quantity pricing for a 100-pin LQFP device is starting at €4.80.

For further information, please visit eu.renesas.com .