Renesas Electronics Europe Releases Compatible Microcontroller Families Optimized for Smart Metering Applications

The new RX210 and RX630 families of MCUs have been developed using two advanced MONOS flash processors to provide compatible devices with a range of different features optimised for smart metering applications. The development of two compatible families allows the system designers to choose the optimum MCUs with particular characteristics required for a new design, while allowing the reuse of much of the same software for each application.

The RX210 provides up to 50 megahertz (MHz) flash operation at 3.3 volts (V), while offering up to 20 MHz performance down to 1.62V, including flash programming and erasure at this low voltage. This facilitates the design of applications that require both battery backup and read while power off. The RX210 currently integrates up to 512 Kbytes (Kb) of on chip Flash, 8 Kb of on-chip data flash supporting 100k w/e cycles and programming and erasing in the background. With up to 64 Kb of on-chip SRAM, future versions will integrate up to 1 Mb of on-chip flash memory.

The RX210 integrates a wide range of features designed for metering including a full Real Time Clock Calendar (RTCC), with automatic calibration, alarm and tamper logging features. It also has a 1 μs 12-bit ADC with triple sample and holds, with automatic control by timer available. Additional features include up to nine serial interfaces including I2C and SPI interfaces, Direct Memory Access (DMA) and Data Transfer Controller (DTC) as well as Event Link Controller (ELC) functions for the easy automation of low level tasks.

The RX630 offers 100 MHz flash performance with an integrated floating point unit and is available in a wide range of package and memory options. The RX630 supports from 64- to 176-pin packages and up to 2 Mb of flash, 32 Kb of dataflash and 128 Kb of on-chip SRAM. Some members of the RX630 family provide pin compatibility with the RX210 family.

The RX630 offers several of the same features as the RX210, plus many more. The RX630 includes up to 13 serial interfaces, 4 additional I2C interfaces and 3 SPI interfaces, as well as a 21 channel 12-bit ADC, and an 8 channel 10-bit ADC. A key feature for metering is the addition support for a battery domain, Vbat, and a full RTC with alarm, calibration and tamper logging. Versions of the RX630 are also available with the option of CAN and USB interfaces, making them ideal for many industrial metering applications.

The RX210 and RX630 also provide many on-chip software and hardware safety features, such as, dual WDTs (one with integrated dedicated oscillator), a CRC function for checking the integrity of the flash memory, systems to detect both a clock failure and a clock running at the wrong frequency, and many more.

Both the RX210 and RX630 are supported by the same range of tools, including a full C compiler package, low-cost evaluation boards and the E1 in-circuit debugger. The RX630 is also supported by the E20 high-performance in-circuit debugger.