Renesas Electronics delivers group of low-power 16-Bit MCUs for vehicle control systems
26 October 2015
Renesas Electronics Corporation announced the RL78/F15 Group of low-power 16-bit microcontrollers (MCUs) for vehicle control systems such as body control modules (BCMs), air conditioners, and power seats, where functionality is advancing rapidly. Part of the RL78 Family of MCUs, the RL78/F15 Group is a high-functionality group that combines industry-leading low-power consumption with high processing performance and CAN communication that can be used independently for control and diagnostics. They are also fully compatible with the RL78/F13 and RL78/F14 Groups.
The increase in automotive systems design complexity drives stronger needs for new solutions that allow customers to scale efficiently and cost effectively. The new RL78/F15 MCUs, extend the reach of our popular RL78/F1x series to deliver the scalability, compatibility and support that enable automotive engineers to quickly, easily, and accurately for develop next-generation vehicle control systems.
—Amrit Vivekanand, Vice President, Automotive Business Unit, Renesas Electronics America
The RL78/F15 product lineup includes a newly added 144-pin package; packages with pin counts of 48-pins and above come with up to 512 kilobytes (KB) of on-chip flash memory. When combined with the current RL78/F13 and RL78/F14 Groups, the resulting lineup includes a total of 127 product versions with pin counts ranging from 20- to 144-pins, enabling system manufacturers to select an MCU that is optimal for their system requirements.
The RL78/F15 Group is software compatible with the RL78/F13 and RL78/F14 Groups, thereby system manufactures can select these products with future functional extension in mind. The added specifications simplify dealing with cases where memory capacity or pin count eventually becomes inadequate.
Notable advances in automotive multi-functionality and performance in recent years have been accompanied by the increasing utilization of electronics in vehicles. Today’s vehicles are equipped with numerous electronic control units (ECUs) associated with all sorts of functions, such as power windows, airbags, lamps, doors, and seats. As a result, the burden of developing software for these ECUs is increasing, and the ability to use common software for multiple ECUs is growing in importance as a way to improve development efficiency.
The 36 product versions of the new RL78/F15 Group extend the RL78 Family 16-bit MCUs for vehicle control, making it among the most extensive lineup in the industry. By adopting the RL78 Family of MCUs in multiple ECUs, system manufactures can utilize common software resources and thereby boost development efficiency.
One of Ford's major headaches with the 8061/65 family of processors was inadequate I/O capacity; I became intimately familiar with the creative necessities forced on the software engineers due to the limitations of the hardware. 144 pins per package goes a long way to remove that bottleneck.
Posted by: Engineer-Poet | 26 October 2015 at 06:42 PM