Renesas Electronics has added the 16-bit general purpose RL78/G23 extended low power MCU to the RL78 product family

     Renesas Electronics, a global provider of semiconductor solutions, announced the launch of the 16-bit universal RL78/G23 microcontroller (MCU) and the start of mass production, a move that will further strengthen Renesas' competitiveness in 8 - and 16-bit RL78 MCUS for a wide range of applications. The RL78/G23 is compatible with Renesas' current general-purpose RL78 MCUS, such as the RL78/G13, while improving power performance to meet the needs of battery-powered applications. In addition, in response to market demand, the on-chip flash memory capacity was increased to 768KB and on-chip peripherals were significantly expanded to increase functionality while improving safety and reducing bill of Materials (BOM) costs. With these capabilities, the new RL78/G23 is ideal for a wide range of applications that require both power consumption and cost, including home electronics, remote controls and iot end devices such as sensors.

     "We have been introducing the RL78 product family for 10 years and are the preeminent supplier to the 16-bit MCU market," said Byrjo Nakanishi, vice president, MCU Solutions Division, Renesas Electronics. I am proud to see the new RL78/G23 product with a new process to achieve lower power consumption, demonstrating Renesas's strong technical innovation." Going forward, we will continue to expand the second generation of the RL78 product family to develop lower-end MCUS that are easy to design and more cost-effective to meet our customers' evolving development needs."

     With the new process, the RL78/G23 achieves 44µA/MHz power consumption while the CPU is running and 210nA in stop mode (retaining 4KB of SRAM), which is lower than the current RL78 MCU power consumption. In addition, the new SNOOZE mode Sequencer (SMS) enables any peripheral operation to run in sleep mode without CPU activation, significantly reducing power consumption for intermittent operation applications. In addition, the Logical and Event Link Controller (ELCL) adds logic capabilities to the traditional Event Link Controller (ELC) (Note 1) in order to continue to benefit from the low power consumption of the ELC while creating multiple event condition links.

     The RL78/G23 features Renesas' unique capacitive touch sensor unit, which combines outstanding high sensitivity and low noise characteristics to enable a gesture-based contactless user interface (UI). The MCU also integrates enhanced security features, making it possible to develop truly secure systems. These include a true random number generator (TRNG) necessary for certificate encryption, a device proprietary ID, and a customer ID that can be specified by the user.