Renesas Electronics Announces New RL78 Microcontrollers (MCUs) with Enhanced Analog Functionality

Renesas has equipped the RL78 Family of MCUs with the superior DNA of the 78K and the R8C Family, contributing to lower system power consumption and reduced system cost. RL78 Family product development continues actively.



Key features of the new RL78/G1A Group of MCUs:



(1) Enhanced analog functions

The RL78/G1A MCUs incorporate enhanced analog functionality such as an accurate 12-bit A/D converter. The RL78/G1A MCUs have an independent power supply for internal analog parts that reduces noise influence from digital peripheral lines. The new devices support a maximum of 28 channel analog inputs, making them ideal for feature-rich sensor applications.



(2) Functions that contribute to reduced system power consumption overall

In addition to its 66 uA/MHz current consumption in active mode, and 0.57 uA with RTC + LVD active, the RL78/G1A MCUs support a new low-power mode called the “snooze mode”. The snooze mode supports analog-to-digital (A/D) conversion and serial communication while the CPU is in standby mode, which significantly extends the life of battery-operated devices.



(3) Small package

The RL78/G1A MCUs support the small packages of 3 x 3 mm land grid array (LGA) package and 4 x 4 mm ball grid array (BGA) package.



(4) Built-in safety mechanisms

The RL78 MCUs incorporate a number of built-in mechanisms that can be utilized to comply with standard safety regulations, such as IEC60730, which are required for electrical appliances. Such features include a flash memory cyclic redundancy check (CRC) function, RAM parity error checking, clock fail and frequency detection circuit, A/D test function and illegal memory access detection.



(5) Industry-standard development tools



Renesas’ low-cost E1 on-chip debugging emulator and the IECUBE full-spec emulator, which provide system designers with the ability to choose the product that best matches their debugging requirements, are available as hardware development tools. For flash programming Renesas offers the PG-FP5 programmer or factory programming. Powerful support for system designers of application software is provided by the IAR Embedded Workbench integrated development environment (IDE) and optimized C++ compiler.



Renesas partner companies continue to expand with a wide variety of hardware and software development tools for the RL78 Family including multiple RTOS providers.