San Jose, Calif. — Renesas Technology America, Inc. has introduced its family of RX62T 32-bit flash microcontrollers (MCU) that enable more energy-efficient control system designs for electric motors and inverters. The new devices, as part of the company’s commitment to its Green Energy Initiative, deliver eco-friendly features including no-wait Flash memory for lower power consumption in motor control and inverter control applications. Key applications include solar inverters, air conditioners, washing machines, lighting controllers and power-factor controllers.
The RX62T devices allow manufacturers of embedded systems to better address the increased importance that buyers of products such as consumer, industrial and HVAC equipment give to energy efficiency, says Renesas.
In addition to the fast speed, high performance, and low power consumption that characterize all RX chips, the RX62T MCUs offer improved motor/inverter control timers and enhanced analog peripheral functions required for implementing more precise control capabilities and providing value-added features in embedded system designs that are more power efficient.
As an example, the RX62T MCUs include MTU3 multifunction timer-pulse units, specialized for motor control, which can drive up to two 3-phase motors. The MCUs also integrate a newly developed 16-bit general-purpose PWM timer (GPT) capable of driving a 3-phase motor. With this combination of timers, one RX62T MCU can control up to three 3-phase motors simultaneously. The timers use the same clock as the MCU, which is capable of 100 MHz, enabling the timers to produce a wide range of PWM output waveforms with 10-ns resolution, says Renesas.
The floating-point unit (FPU) and improved analog functions built into the RX62T MCUs make these devices suitable for use with three-shunt or single-shunt vector-type motor control methods, while also making the chips easier to use, said Renesas. The single-precision FPU offloads the RX CPU and simplifies decimal-point calculations, boosting overall processing performance and simplifying firmware development, according to the company.
There are two 12-bit A/D converter units and one 10-bit A/D converter unit that can capture analog input values from up to 20 channels at a minimum conversion time of 1 us. Each of the A/D units can be triggered by timer units and can sample three phases in parallel. The 12-bit A/D includes three programmable gain amplifiers and three window comparators, which eliminate the need for external operational amplifiers and comparators used for over-current and over-voltage protection, thus reducing system cost and simplifying printed-circuit-board (PCB) layout.
The MCUs also provide scalable memory solutions from 64 KB flash to 256 KB flash, and with up to 16 KB RAM embedded. An additional independent 8 KB of data-flash memory with a background operation (BGO) function is included, allowing data to be written at the same time a program is executing, said Renesas.
The embedded flash memory is based on the Renesas MONOS (Metal Oxide Nitride Oxide Silicon) technology that can be accessed at 100 MHz without wait-state insertion. This fast memory, combined with the RX’s Harvard-type architecture, enables the MCUs to deliver 1.65 DMIPS/MHz at any CPU frequency up to 100 MHz, without any limitation from flash technology. All devices in the RX62T group achieve very low power consumption at only 0.5 mA/MHz in full active mode with all peripherals operating. The devices are available in 64-pin, 80-pin, 100-pin and 112-pin LQFPs.
The RX62T MCUs provide a JTAG debugger interface that allows connections to the Renesas E1 and E20 on-chip debuggers and access to similar JTAG third-party debugging products. Hardware and software development tools are available from a network of third-party suppliers and alliance partners.
Availability: Sampling to lead customers.
Pricing: $3.35 for the R5F562T7BDFM version (RX62T MCU with 128 KB main flash, 8 KB data flash, and 8 KB SRAM in a LQFP64 package) in quantities of 10,000.