Low power 16-bit Flash microcomputer incorporates Ethernet and USB for smaller, lower-cost systems

The H8S/2472F is the first H8S Family 16-bit microcontroller to incorporate an IEEE802.3 standard compliant media access controller (MAC), enabling connection to a 10/100Mbps (megabit per second) Ethernet LAN. This eliminates the need for an external dedicated Ethernet chip, enabling system size and cost to be reduced.

The H8S/2472F incorporates a comprehensive set of peripheral functions, including a USB Function interface (full speed support), I2C bus, and LPC*3 (low pin count) bus, allowing connection to a variety of peripheral systems.

The use of a 176-pin BGA (Ball Grid Array) package enables the mounting area to be reduced, allowing smaller systems to be implemented. Within the H8S/2472 series, other form factors as LQFP-144 and small TFP-144 packages will be available.

In addition to the trend for smaller and more sophisticated systems, there is a growing demand for network connectivity for sharing and managing information with other systems. The mainstream trend among servers, communication equipments, and industrial products in particular, is for an Ethernet controller to be incorporated in individual systems and for information to be exchanged among them using a network such as the Internet. At the same time, there is an increasing need for microcontrollers featuring an on-chip Ethernet controller function and a small package in order to implement smaller, lower-cost systems.

The H8S/2472F incorporates the field-proven Ethernet controller module used in Renesas Technology’s 32-bit SuperH™*4 Family, together with a USB function required by various systems.
Other on-chip peripheral functions included in current H8S Family devices are also provided, such as an LPC bus, I2C bus, SCI and SPI, providing flexibility for functional extension and version upgrading of current systems, and construction of interfaces to external systems. Typical applications are in server/communication equipment for use as temperature/voltage control systems, and in industrial products for system control, etc.

Together with dedicated OS vendors and network specialists as such as e.g. Micrium (and Embedded Office), NexGen, CMX, Segger, Sevenstax and Thesycon, there is a broad range of available firmware and operating system solutions to choose from. The designer does have plenty of choices to get a seamlessly fitting development environment, from hardware starter kits over to complete BSPs (board support packages) with optimized operating systems, TCP/IP and USB stack support. For non-commercial TCP/IP support, Open Source stacks as e. g. µIP are available in addition.
A Renesas Starter Kit (RSK) is in sampling stage now and planned to be available by 2Q08. RSKs are low-cost, complete with full E10A debugger and software and are highly user-friendly. The E10A on-chip debugging emulator is available as a development environment, enabling fully non intrusive debug.