Renesas Technology Europe announces the availability of the H8SX/1664F, a H8SX 32-bit microcontroller, that offers 50 Dhrystone MIPS performance at 3.3V/50MHz, and is supported by 512Kbyte of full-speed zero-wait embedded Flash and 40Kbyte RAM. It also boasts a USB slave module and six serial ports, which support async, sync, ISO/IEC7816-3 and IrDA modes, as well as two channels of IIC. Each of the device’s serial ports are independent and have their own baud rate generator and four vectored interrupts per channel. They support LSB or MSB-first shift directions and can run as fast as 720kbit/s in asynchronous mode. All the connectivity modules are supported by either the Direct Memory Access (DMA) or the Data Transfer Controller (DTC) so that no CPU performance is wasted in moving the data to or from the modules.

The device’s peripheral set features a six channel 16-bit timer unit (TPU) with 20ns resolution and up to 16 input capture/output compare. It also includes additional 8-bit timers; real time outputs that can generate up to eight channels of data patterns - useful for stepper motors for example; a watchdog timer; a 10-bit ADC and 8-bit DAC; a 32KHz subclock and up to 92 general purpose input/output lines. The H8SX/1664F is upwards compatible with other H8 microcontrollers. It is available in a 144-pin RoHS-compliant LQFP package and is supported by Renesas’ E10A-USB on-chip-debugger. A Renesas Starter Kit (RSK) for the device will be available in the third Quarter 2006.