MCU integrates capacitive touch-sensing unit

The RL78/G23 microcontroller is compatible with Renesas’ RL78 family of microcontrollers, offering engineers increased 16-bit performance and lower power consumption for a host of consumer and industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications.

Utilising new processes and functionality the microcontroller expands peripheral features and efficiency while lowering power consumption, making it suitable for a wide range of applications, from home appliances and consumer electronics to industrial automation.

The device consumes just 44 µA/MHz at CPU operation and 210 nA in STOP mode (with 4 Kbytes of SRAM retention), offering improved performance compared to current series microcontrollers.

A newly implemented snooze mode sequencer (SMS) makes it unnecessary to activate the CPU while peripheral operations are in snooze mode, dramatically improving efficiency for applications that require intermittent operation.

The RL78/G23 features a wide operating voltage range of 1.6 V to 5.5 V up to 32 MHz, with 768 Kbytes of on-chip flash memory capacity.

A logic and event link controller (ELCL) makes it possible to create conditional links to multiple events while continuing to benefit from the reduced power consumption realized by the conventional event link controller (ELC).

The RL78 family’s first capacitive touch-sensing unit (CTSU2L) combines high-sensitivity and low-noise characteristics, which can be used to implement a contactless gesture-based user interface, ideal for consumer and industrial control surfaces.

The RL78/G23 Fast Prototyping Board, also available at Mouser Electronics, is designed for prototyping various applications using the RL78/G23 microcontroller.

The board comes standard with Arduino Uno and Grove interfaces for simplified programming and offers high scalability with access to all pins on the microcontroller.