Renesas Electronics Europe Announces New Capacitive Touch Evaluation Kit Compliant with IEC/EN 61000-4-6 Industry Standard

The system has been designed to demonstrate the ability to pass up to 15V noise injection level over the full frequency range of 150kHz to 230MHz for all keys. This performance surpasses the IEC/EN 61000-4-6 Level 3 specification, which goes beyond the requirements of typical consumer and industrial applications. The kit is based on Renesas’ R8C/3xT-A MCUs, the latest line-up of R8C family devices designed for capacitive touch key applications. The R8C touch MCUs incorporate a specialized hardware block called Touch Sensor Control Unit (SCU), which handles touch scanning and processing functions completely independent from the CPU. With this solution, Renesas provides engineers with all of the demonstration, evaluation and development tools needed to get to market with robust touch key solutions for medical, home appliance, consumer and building/office automation systems requiring enhanced human-machine interfaces (HMI).

“As people desire to interact with their electronics more easily and intuitively, the use touch sensing technology in HMI is becoming prevalent in applications ranging from consumer electronics to medical devices to building automation,” said Andy Harding, Senior Manager, Segment Marketing, Renesas Electronics Europe. “The hardware-assisted touch capability in Renesas R8C MCUs enables efficient touch and system control in a single chip, reducing overall power consumption and system cost, and the latest noise immunity testing performed under supervision of TÜV Rheinland is a great testament to the capabilities of Renesas’ touch technology. The new kit clearly demonstrates how the SCU, optimized touch firmware and advanced tuning tool offer designers an easy-to-use solution to develop innovative and robust touch key interfaces”.

About the Renesas R8C/3xT-A based CapacitiveTouch Evaluation Kit
The new R8C/3xT-A based touch kit is a self-contained system that helps engineers learn more about Renesas’ MCU-based, hardware-assisted capacitive touch key solutions, conduct end-to-end evaluation of that technology – including touch performance – and develop their own applications leveraging features like the Renesas touch API firmware, application notes and advanced Renesas Touch Workbench tool for system fine tuning. The touch kit enables engineers to evaluate keypad, slide and wheel configurations (including a 3x4 keypad) for touch sensitivity and noise performance on a single-board system.

Features include:

• R8C/36T-A MCU featuring operating speeds up to 20 MHz, multiple power-saving modes and the ability to execute both touch functions and system control – such as serial communications to a display subsystem, analog to digital conversion of a light sensor output, and buzzer and LED control – all on a single chip

• Option to measure the MCU’s power consumption to demonstrate the benefits of the hardware-assisted touch scanning and detection provided by the SCU

• Renesas Touch API optimized to reduce memory requirements and provided as full source code for easier modification/integration into end-user systems’ applications

• Renesas Touch Workbench tool featuring a simple yet powerful GUI-based interface that provides real-time touch control and monitoring of each touch channel for the easiest system tuning; the Workbench can also be utilized during development of the user’s system

• A USB interface for system power and PC communication

• Renesas High-Performance Embedded Workshop (HEW) integrated development environment (IDE) with an unlimited use full-featured C Compiler for 60 days(Note 1)

• Renesas standard E1 on-chip debug emulator for debugging and programming of the touch kit board or the user’s supplied system

• A full set of documentation, including application notes to guide users through the evaluation and design process

Note 1
The Renesas Electronics' C compiler will limit only code size to 64KB after 60 days of use.