Renesas Electronics announced the expansion of the RL78 Family with the introduction of the new RL78/G1A Group of microcontrollers (MCUs). The 16-bit MCUs are ideal for a number of applications including industrial automation sensors, white goods, home automation and medical applications. The devices incorporate enhanced analog functionality such as an 12-bit A/D converter. The 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. In addition to its 66 uA/MHz current consumption in active mode, and 0.57 uA with RTC + LVD active, the chips 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.

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

Renesas’ 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. Support for system designers of application software is provided by the IAR Embedded Workbench integrated development environment (IDE) and optimized C++ compiler.