Touch MCUs boast improved sensitivity

21st February 2018

Mick Elliott

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The RX130 Group of 32-bit microcontrollers from Renesas Electronics is now being shipped by Mouser Electronics. With a new capacitive touch IP with improved sensitivity and robustness, the RX130 microcontrollers are ideal for devices designed with non-traditional touch materials or required to operate in wet or dirty environments, such as human machine interfaces, household kitchen and bath, motor control, and factory applications.

The microcontrollers feature a 50-DMIPS RX core with up to 512Kbytes of flash for code with no wait states. In addition to extended memory options, the microcontrollers increase package size up to 100 pins to provide higher performance and compatibility with the RX231/RX230 Group of touch microcontrollers.

These low-power devices feature a 0.37µA sleep mode with a recovery time of only 4.8µs and integrate a 36-channel capacitive touch sensor, offering high responsiveness and functionality for a broad variety of touch-based applications.

The microcontrollers also offer a two-channel digital-to-analogue converter (DAC) and a 12-bit analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) capable of conversion within 1.4μs.

Multiple development tools are available. The RX130 Capacitive Touch Evaluation System is a modular development platform for demonstrating the microcontrollers’ various touch functions. The system includes a base CPU board, a self-capacitance application board, and a mutual-capacitance application board for testing functions such as slider, wheel, and proximity touch.

The RX130 Starter Kit provides a compact development platform that includes bundled code, Renesas’ Eclipse-based e² studio integrated development environment and a C/C++ compiler. The starter kit allows developers to begin evaluating the RX130 microcontroller right out of the box.