Renesas RL78/G23 microcontroller (MCU)

Renesas Electronics has announced its 16-bit general-purpose RL78/G23 microcontroller (MCU). Compatible with the company’s current general-purpose RL78 MCUs, the RL78/G23 increases the on-chip flash memory capacity to 768 KB and expands on-chip peripheral functions, which extend functionality while reducing the bill of materials (BOM) cost and improving power consumption required by battery-powered applications. The product is suitable for applications that require both power and cost efficiency, including IoT endpoint devices such as home electronics, remote controls and sensors.

The MCU realises 44 µA/MHz at CPU operation and 210 nA during STOP (with 4 KB of SRAM retention), an even lower power consumption compared to current RL78 MCUs. The SNOOZE mode sequencer (SMS) makes it unnecessary to activate the CPU while any peripheral operations are operating in snooze mode, reducing power consumption for applications that utilise intermittent operation. The logic and event link controller (ELCL) adds logic functionality to the capabilities of a conventional event link controller (ELC), making it possible to create conditional links to multiple events while continuing to benefit from the reduced power consumption realised by the ELC.

The device features a capacitive touch sensor unit that combines high-sensitivity and low-noise characteristics and can be used to implement a contactless gesture-based user interface (UI). The MCU also incorporates security functions including a true random number generator (TRNG), for certificate encryption, as well as a device-specific unique ID and a customer ID that can be specified by the user.