Renesas Electronics RX23E-A series 32-bit microcontrollers

Renesas Electronics Corporation has introduced the RX23E-A series of 32-bit microcontrollers (MCUs), combining a high-precision analog front end (AFE) and an MCU on a single chip. Designed for manufacturing and test and measurement equipment applications that require high-precision measurements of analog signals for temperature, pressure, weight and flow, the MCUs enable such signals to be measured with better than 0.1% precision without calibration.

The MCUs achieve AFE precision at a level that could previously only be reached by combining dedicated A/D converter circuits with high-precision operational amplifier ICs. By integrating this high-precision AFE IP on a single chip using the same fabrication process technology, Renesas has made it possible to implement high-precision sensor measurement, computation, control and communications on a single chip. This allows system manufacturers to reduce the number of required components, save space and simplify system design in a wide range of equipment requiring high-precision measurement. It also accelerates endpoint intelligence by enabling distributed processing with MCUs.

The MCUs are based on the RXv2 core, which features operating speeds of 32 MHz, a digital signal processor (DSP) and superlative floating point unit (FPU) calculations. This allows the implementation of adaptive control using temperature data and inverse matrix calculations using 6-axis distortion data. For example, robot arm force sensors require the measurement and calculation of the 6-axis distortion in a small space. The MCUs make it possible to measure the 6-axis distortion data and perform the inverse matrix calculations with a single chip.