(iTers News) - Renesas Electronics Corporation, a premier provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced the addition of two new functions on its 41 products with pin counts of 100 pins to 144 pins in the RX63T Group of microcontrollers (MCUs), which derives from the company's successful RX600 Series of high-speed, high-performance midrange MCUs.
The newly added functions are a PWM (pulse-width modulation) delay generation function and a digital power management control function, which provide an easy implementation of digital power management control solutions, which became a focus key technology for implementing an energy-efficient “smart society.”
The PWM delay generation function enables high-resolution adjustment of PWM output in increments as small as 312.5 picoseconds (one-trillionth of a second), allowing more precise and optimized power control. The digital power management control function entails the integration of a digital power management controller (DPC) in hardware. It provides a robust control algorithm that automatically compensates for inconsistency in the characteristics of the elements within the power supply unit. This results in enormous savings, since the system design engineering can reduce the man-hours work required for manual tuning of the power supply. The new functions are both driven by high-speed hardware, which allows the use of higher switching frequencies and contributes to more compact power supply dimensions.
Due to global warming and energy shortages, demands for more eco-friendly lifestyle are rising. There is emphasis on adding energy-saving functions to electric household appliances and consumer products such as air conditioners and refrigerators. At the same time, there is demand for low-power design in embedded devices used in industrial equipment. As a way to reduce power consumption, digital control is increasingly being adopted as an alternative to conventional analog power supply configurations. As a result, increasing importance is being placed on more precise power management control to boost efficiency, achieve greater compactness, and improve design efficiency.
Although MCUs have been used to implement digital power management control, the number of MCU models capable of performing the high-resolution PWM control required for this purpose was limited. In addition, precise tuning is required to match the load characteristics of the device subject to power management control. A special tuning process was required to compensate for inconsistency in the characteristics (deviation from the design values) of the elements within the power supply unit. Also, digital power management control requires complex calculations for feedback control.
Since the processing needs to be done in software, a higher performance controller would be demanded. Renesas provides the RX63T MCU, the latest evolution of the widely scalable RX 32-bit family, with features such as a high resolution PWM timer, 100 MHz CPU performance and all the tuning mechanisms to design a highly efficient single chip solution.