Renesas announced an expansion of its M16C Platform microcontroller lineup with 16 models that can operate down to 1.8V. These devices, especially trimmed versions of the M16C/60 group, are fully compatible with previous products. The M16C/63 family of devices can operate between 1.8 to 5.5 V and utilise the M16C/60 16-bit CISC CPU core. At 1.8 to 2.7 V the CPU is running at speeds up to 5 MHz. From 2.7 to 5.5 V, 20MHz operation can be achieved. In full active mode, with Vcc=3V, WDT, RTC and external 32kHz crystal running and the CPU clocked at 20MHz, a total power consumption of 9mA is possible. In the devices wait mode, with WDT, RTC and external 32kHz crystal running, 3.5uA is achievable at Vcc=1.8V.

New features include a CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) circuit, a low-voltage detection (LVD) circuit, real-time clock with full calendar functionality (RTC), high-precision (40MHz) on-chip oscillator and a watchdog timer with an independent oscillator (125kHz). A hardware multi-master I2C-bus has also been added in place of the simplified I2C-bus. The on-chip peripheral functions have been improved to include a A/D converter, 6 USART, 2 SIO, CRC unit and 4 DMA controllers. The 10-bit A/D converter achieves a conversion speed of 2.15 μs and offers 26 channels. The devices are available with on-chip Flash and RAM memory in density combinations of 128kB/12kB and 256kB/20kB. The ICs also have an extra flash memory for data storage. Two banks of 4kB DataFlash*2 each, with an endurance of 10,000 cycles in both read and write operations, as well as a bank of 16kB to store a customised boot-loader are included.

The M16C/63 will be available in 80-pin and 100-pin QFP packages. The new E8a on-chip debugging emulator is available as a development environment. The E8a can also be used as a flash programmer.