Renesas Electronics has given details of its plans for the RX family of microcontrollers, which include its lowest power, lowest cost 32-bit MCU.
The RX100 series microcontrollers are based on a 130nm process technology and run at 32MHz, delivering 1.56DMIPS/MHz throughput.
They will consume only 110µA/MHz power in full active mode and targeting only 350nA in the standby mode.
This places the microcontrollers in the same class as ARM Cortex-M3 based chips, which achieve 175µA/MHz in active mode and under 250nA in sleep mode.
"The figure of only 350nA current consumption and 70µA/DMIPS is the kind of power consumption typically only found in the 8-bit market," said the company from the Embedded World exhibition in Nuremburg.
Likely applications are wearable/battery powered applications including medical and sensor products.
Last December, Silicon Labs released a low-power ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller family, called Precision32 SiM3L1xx, the MCUs claimed to be able to run at 175µA/MHz in active mode, and under 250nA in sleep with the real-time clock (RTC) enabled at 3.6V.
The first samples of the RX100 32-bit RX devices offering flash memory integration from 8KB to 128KB, are now available and mass production is scheduled for 4Q of 2013.
Source:
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2013/02/26/55639/renesas-mcu-matches-arm-cortex-m3-for-low-power.htm
