Renesas Electronics Introduces V850E2M/MN4 32-Bit All Flash Microcontrollers

Recently, manufacturing systems are becoming increasingly highly-precise, faster and more complex to boost the manufacturing capacity of the plants and more complex, MCUs integrated in factory automation (FA) systems, such as motion drives, servo drives and inverters, are required to provide higher performance. In the meantime, it is also important to provide compact MCUs with less power consumption to meet the growing consumer demand for environmentally friendly products.



To address these growing demands, Renesas Electronics developed the new MCUs with the following main features.



(1) Incorporates two 32-bit CPU core with the world’s highest performance



By enhancing the pipeline structure of the company’s existing V850E2 CPU core, Renesas Electronics has strengthened the parallel processing capability required for demanding environments and successfully developed the V850E2M core with high processing performance of 2.56 Dhrystone MIPS per MHz per core, increased by 1.4 times from the company’s previous V850E2 core. By employing two V850E2M core, system designers can realize the world’s highest processing performance of 1024 DMIPS at a clock speed of 200 MHz while still maintaining low power consumption of 0.88 milliwats (mW) per Dhrystone MIPS. The single core is 60 percent less power compared to the dual core. In addition, the V850E2M CPU core extends its floating point units (FPU) to facilitate greater accuracy and range in floating point numbers, making it suitable for information appliances that require high-speed data processing or complex algorithm calculations



(2) Large capacity and high-speed flash memory



The new MCUs incorporate up to 2 MB of flash memory fabricated through scaled-down, high-speed 90 nanometer (nm) process technology. In addition, the new MCUs include flash memory caches for each CPU core that are capable of single-cycle access at 200 MHz, contributing to improvement of overall system speed.



(3) Expanded peripheral functions



In addition to the newly added CAN, USB (Host and Function) and Ethernet interfaces, the new MCUs offer an extensive lineup of peripheral functions, including dramatically increased number of channels for the timers and serial interfaces. The rich lineup of peripheral functions makes it possible for system designers to reduce the number of off-chip components, save board space, and realize compact systems at lower cost. Two external memory busses are also provided to facilitate the development process for ASICs and external memory, contributing to higher performance.



(4) Extensive lineup of software development environment



Renesas Electronics will provide system designers with optimal multi core development environments supporting asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP).



In addition, Prism solution, a multi core software development analysis environment, which allows software engineers to easily assess and realize the full potential of multi core processors without the need to change the source code or additional simulations, is also available from CriticalBlue, provider of embedded multi core software analysis. More information about CriticalBlue’s Prism solution can be found at http://www.criticalblue.com/criticalblue_products/prism.shtml



System designers can choose either a single-core or dual-core MCU product, each MCU employing Renesas Electronics’ state-of-the-art V850E2M CPU core with robust processing capability. Renesas Electronics believes these new MCUs will contribute to development of competitive systems for the fields of FA, Industrial drives, printers and home appliances.