Renesas Technology

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Renesas Technology Corporation

Type	Corporation
Founded	April 1, 2003
Headquarters	Tokyo, Japan
Key people	Katsuhiro Tsukamoto, Representative Director, Chairman Yasushi Akao, Representative Director, President
Industry	Semiconductor
Revenue	¥702.7 billion (2008)
Employees	25,000
Website	america.renesas.com (Americas) www.renesas.eu (Europe) www.renesas.com (Global)

Renesas Technology Corporation (ルネサス テクノロジ^?) is a Japanese semiconductor manufacturer. It is based in Tokyo and has manufacturing, design and sales operations in around 20 countries with about 25,000 employees worldwide. Renesas is one of the world's largest manufacturers of semiconductor systems for mobile phones and automotive applications. It is the world's largest manufacturer of microcontrollers and the second largest manufacturer of application processors^[1]. Renesas is also known for LCD drivers, RF ICs, mixed-signal integrated circuits and system-on-a-chip semiconductors.

Renesas Technology is among the worldwide top 20 semiconductor sales leaders.

Renesas Technology was established on April 1, 2003, as a joint venture of Hitachi, Ltd. (55%) and Mitsubishi Electric (45%).

In April 2009, Renesas and NEC Electronics reached a basic agreement to merge by around April 2010. The new company will be Japan's biggest and the world's third-largest chipmaker.^[2]

Products

The product range includes a wide variety of semiconductor components, including:

• System LSIs
  • Microcontrollers/microprocessors (including smart cards)
  • ASICs
  • Logic ICs
  • Analog ICs
• Discrete devices (diodes, power MOSFETs, thyristors and triacs, transistors)
• Memory ICs (Flash, SRAM, TTRAM)

Renesas has three primary roadmaps of microcontrollers: the general purpose M16C Family (R8C, M16C, R32C), the application specialized H8 Family (H8, H8S, H8SX) and the high end 32-bit RISC SuperH Family (SH-1, SH-2, SH-3, SH-4). ^[3]

M16C Microcontroller Family

M16C microcontrollers

The M16C is a 16-bit embedded microcontroller originally developed and manufactured by Mitsubishi Semiconductor. It is available in a number of different versions with various amounts of flash memory and uses the same instruction set across the range which allows engineers to keep the same code base and development tools.

R8C microcontrollers

The R8C is an 8-bit microcontroller with a 16-bit ALU. It was developed as a cost-effective version of the M16C. It retains the M16C's 16-bit CISC core architecture and instruction set, but trades performance for size by reducing the internal data bus from 16-bits to 8-bits. It is available in a number of different versions with up to 128KB of flash memory and SRAM.^[4]

All R8C microcontrollers have an internal ring oscillator and can be used without external resonators. Common interfaces are UART and the R8C/22 and R8C/23 devices have CAN interfaces. Some devices have internal data flash memory, which is meant as a replacement for serial EEPROM, although it handles fewer write cycles than a real serial EEPROM. R8C devices also feature on-chip debugging (see In-circuit emulator).

R32C microcontrollers

The R32C is a 32-bit microcontroller originally developed by Renesas as a 32-bit version of the M16C. It is available in a number of different versions with up to 1MB of flash memory and up to 48KB of RAM.

H8 Microcontroller Family

H8 is the name of a large family of 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers originally developed in the early 1990s by Hitachi Semiconductor.

SuperH Microcontroller Family

SuperH is a 32-bit embedded RISC microcontroller originally developed and manufactured in the early 1990s by Hitachi Semiconductor.

See also

• Elpida Memory

References

External links

• Renesas Technology Europe Website
• Renesas Technology America Website
• http://www.RenesasInteractive.com - Online training for Renesas products
• http://www.RenesasRulz.com - A community support forum
• Online Tutorial on Renesas M32C/80 series (Clubelek)

Development tools for complete Renesas platform:

• http://www.kpitgnutools.com, Official free Toolchains with Support