NEC Electronics Europe announces 16-bit microcontroller

3rd September 2008

ES Admin

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NEC Electronics Europe announces that its latest measurements of just 0.52mA/MIPS at 20MHz confirm its industry-leading position in low power consumption, significantly enhancing existing products and setting new standards against leading competition in this as well as lower speed and low power operating modes. In addition, the dedicated real-time clock function requires just 1.0uA of standby current. There is also no sacrifice in performance, offering 0.65DMIPS/MHz (Dhrystone 1.1) which, according to NEC Electronics’ measurements, more than doubles the equivalent performance of the latest other similarly positioned products on the market. These combine to offer the industry’s leading power / performance ratio at 1.5 milliwatts (mW) per million instructions per second (Dhrystone 1.1).

This low power, high performance 16-bit microcontroller is backed by a truly high degree of fully implemented on-chip peripherals that present designers with real application enhancement opportunities today, as well as significant cost-savings and simpler design.

One such opportunity includes three fully specified, highly accurate oscillator circuits providing up to 20MHz performance on-chip at +/-1% accuracy, and enabling selection of 1MHz, 8MHz or 20MHz clocks whilst completely removing the need for an external clock circuit.

Innovative new analog circuitry has also been implemented on-chip, including accurate, high-speed A/D converters that work across the entire supply voltage range plus on-chip x1 to x12 programmable operational amplifier and 2 comparator channels making the 78K0R/Kx3-L an ideal selection for sensor applications.For power-critical applications, further enhancements to increase battery lifetime include Flash programming down to 1.8V and a 1.8V to 5.5V supply voltage, without restriction, across the entire family.

Fully flexible 16-bit timer and serial interface array units plus standard peripherals such as the Real-Time Clock, DMA controller, windowed Watchdog timer and other safety functions complete 78K0R/Kx3-L’s highly integrated peripheral set. Embedded Flash memory sizes start from just 16KB, with variants all the way up to 512KB available across the 78K0R family, providing a flexible and seamless upgrade path to more functionality if required. In common with all NEC Electronics microcontrollers, 78K0R/Kx3-L are specified across the entire temperature and supply voltage ranges.

78K0R/Kx3-L samples started shipping in August 2008, with mass production of the 22 new devices following later in the year.