Renesas Electronics Energy Harvesting embedded controller "SOTB RE product family" launched

     Renesas Electronics Corporation announced the launch of the newly named RE product family, which covers the company's full line of energy-harvesting embedded controllers. The RE family of products is based on Renesas' unique SOTB (Silicon on Thin Buried Oxide) process, which significantly reduces operating and standby power consumption without the need for battery replacement or recharging. With the official release of the RE01 (formerly R7F0E Embedded Controller), the first product group in the RE family, Renesas quickly introduced the new RE01 product Group evaluation suite to help users immediately invest in the application evaluation of this energy harvesting application system.

     Keito Nikita, senior vice president of Renesas Electronics and head of SoC Business, Internet of Things and Infrastructure, said: "Energy harvesting reduces the labor and costs associated with battery maintenance to zero and is one of the fundamental solutions to comply with environmental protection. "I'm thrilled that Renesas is introducing the RE01 Evaluation suite, which allows application engineers to quickly start evaluating projects, and look forward to accelerating the adoption of the Internet of Everything on devices."

     The new RE01 package includes an evaluation board for the RE01 embedded controller, an energy harvesting device interface, and a rechargeable battery interface. The kit also features Arduino-compatible interfaces for easy expansion and evaluation of sensor boards and Pmod™ connectors for expansion and evaluation of wireless functionality; In addition, the ultra-low power MIP LCD (Note 1) expansion board helps users evaluate display functions more quickly.

     The kit comes with sample code and application instructions, as well as driver software that supports CMSIS (the Arm® Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface standard) as a design reference for battery-free maintenance power management. The kit provides sample code for ultra-low power A/D converters, digital filters and FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) routines, 2D graphics MIP LCD displays, and secure boot and secure firmware update capabilities for increased security. With these capabilities, the suite enables energy harvesting at the system level based on the RE01 product group chip and accelerates battery maintenance-free device development.

     Renesas Energy harvesting chips use the revolutionary SOTB process, which enables users to simultaneously achieve low operating and standby currents, as well as high speeds at low voltages. The RE01's 32-bit CPU core enables users to power devices requiring only tiny amounts of energy in ambient energy fields, such as light, vibration, or liquid flow, enabling intelligent functionality.

     The embedded controllers in the RE01 product group are based on the Arm Cortex®-M0+ core, operate at clock frequencies up to 64 MHz, and offer up to 1.5 MB of low-power flash memory and 256 KB of SRAM. The RE01 operates at a voltage as low as 1.62V and is available in three packages: 156-pin WLBGA, 144-pin LQFP and 100-pin LQFP. The RE01 also includes an energy harvesting control circuit, an ultra-low-power 14-bit A/D converter, and a low-power circuit that can rotate, amplify, or invert graphics data.

     The above SOTB embedded controllers remove noise from signal data in biomonitor or outdoor environment sensing applications, enabling applications to perform high-precision sensing and data judgment. Because it eliminates the need for battery maintenance in a wide range of applications, such as wearable devices without battery charging, and sensing applications for homes, buildings, factories, and farms where it is difficult to manually change batteries or charge them, it provides a direct aid to realizing the interconnection of everything in real life.