Renesas RL78/I1A microcontroller range

Renesas has available five 16-bit microcontrollers, the RL78/I1A family, that implement in a single chip the LED control, power supply control and communication functions required in LED lighting fixtures.

The MCUs adopt the company’s RL78 CPU, which achieves both high computational performance and ultralow power consumption, and include from 32 to 64 KB of flash memory in 20- to 38-pin package versions.

The devices achieve 20% reduced power consumption during normal operation over the 78K0/Ix2 devices.

The company has added the high-performance, ultralow power 16-bit RL78/I1A family of MCUs to its existing 8-bit MCU line-ups for use in lighting ballasts. The family addresses the need of a variety of lifestyles for lower cost, high-colour dimming and colour temperature control and supports lighting communication standards for centralised control in buildings and offices.

Key features of the devices include: improved PWM output function for fine-grained dimming and colour temperature adjustment; built-in PFC control function for reduced IC parts counts; the MCUs provide an overcurrent detection function that uses comparators (including window comparators that allow both upper and lower limits to be set) for overvoltage and overcurrent detection and stops PWM timer output automatically; in addition to CSI, these devices also support the I²C bus and UART (DMX512) standards and the DALI (digital addressable lighting interface) open standard for lighting communication which also supports extended DALI frames.