The Renesas Electronics Corporation has introduced its RE Family of energy harvesting embedded controllers. The family is based on SOTB (Silicon on Thin Buried Oxide) process technology, which can dramatically reduce power consumption in both the active and standby state, eliminating the need for battery replacement or recharging. Following the mass production RE01 Group, the first of the RE Family, the new RE01 Group Evaluation kit have also been launched which allows users working with the RE01 Group of devices to jump start system evaluations for energy harvesting applications.
The SOTB process technology can allow the user to simultaneously achieve low active current and low standby current and high operation at low voltage. The RE01’s 32-bit core enables the users to implement intelligent functions in the equipment powered by low levels of harvested energy through ambient energy such as light, vibration or fluid flow.
Features of RE01 Group of embedded controllers
- They are based on Arm Cortex®-M0+ core, which can operate at clock frequencies up to 64 MHz.
- Operating Voltage as low as 1.6V.
- It provides up to 1.5 MB of low-power flash memory and 256 KB of SRAM.
- Available in three package versions: a 156-pin WLBGA package, a 144-pin LQFP package, and a 100-pin LQFP package.
- Includes an energy harvesting control circuit, an ultra-low-power 14-bit A/D converter, and a low power circuit that can rotate, enlarge, or invert graphics data.
Features included in the RE01 Evaluation Kit
- An RE01 embedded controller, an interface for the energy harvesting device and a rechargeable battery interface.
- An Arduino-compatible interface for easy expansion and evaluation of sensor boards.
- A Pmod connector to expand and evaluate wireless functionality.
- An ultra-low-power MIP LCD expansion board that helps the users to evaluate display functions faster.
- Sample codes and application notes that serve as references for power management design that eliminates the need for battery maintenance.
- Driver software that supports CMSIS, Arm®’s Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard.
- Sample code for ultra-low power A/D converters, digital filter and FFT (fast Fourier transforms) routines, 2D graphics MIP LCD displays, and secure boot and secure firmware update functions for improved security.
With the Above features, the kit makes it possible to adopt energy harvesting based on RE01 Group devices at the system level and will accelerate the development of equipment that does not require battery maintenance. IAR Embedded Workbench® for Arm which can use the high-efficiency IAR C/C++ compiler, and e2 studio, which can use the free GNU compiler are available as the development environment.
The RE family of embedded controllers helps the applications to perform highly accurate sensing and data judgment by excluding noise from signal data when they are used as biological monitors or outdoor environmental sensing applications. By eliminating the need for battery maintenance in a wide range of applications, these embedded controllers will contribute to the increasingly widespread use of IoT equipment, such as wearable equipment without the inconvenience of recharging batteries, and sensing applications for homes, buildings, factories and farms, where the manual changing or recharging of batteries is difficult.
Renesas will continue expanding the RE Family beyond 2020 with new members, including small memory sizes featuring up to 256 KB of flash memory. The RE01 Evaluation Kit is available now with a reference price of USD 344 per unit (excluding tax). For more details on the RE01 Group of Evaluation Kit visit the official page on Renesas website.
