Renesas samples 28nm MCUs with embedded flash
Car OEMs and Tier 1 manufacturers, such as Denso Corp. have adopted the 28nm MCU, Renesas said.
It has been widely held that flash memory would not be able to migrate reliably or cost effectively to 28nm, because of such issues as cell complexity and high voltages required. Renesas announced the development of the 28nm embedded flash memory in February 2015 and that it was collaborating with TSMC on 28nm MCUs in September 2016.
Renesas is using a Metal-Oxide-Nitride-Oxide-Silicon (MONOS) structure in which each transistor in the flash cell consists of three layers – oxide, nitride, and oxide – on a silicon base, with a metal control gate at the top. Renesas has extended the technology by developing a split-gate (SG) structure suitable for MCU internal flash memory.
The RH850/E2x Series MCU incorporates up to six 400MHz CPU cores making it capable of 9600 MIPS performance. The new MCU series also features a built-in flash memory of up to 16Mbytes as well as enhanced security functions and functional safety.
Compared to the 40nm MCUs, the 28nm MCUs achieves approximately three times the performance at the same power level. The use of flash memory supports the over-the-air updates of code for wireless updates of control programs.
The RH850/E2x Series also comes with improved serial interfaces, including up to ten channels of CAN FD and one Ethernet channel. Multi-core virtual environments and model-based development environments for the new MCUs will be available from Renesas partner companies.
The RH850/E2x Series has a dual-core lock-step CPU architecture to target ASIL-D, the highest level of the ISO 26262 functional safety standard.
The RH850/E2x also provides up to four sets of CPU pairs, and features a variety of hardware functional safety improvements. In applications where a system malfunction could lead to life-endangering accidents, these features immediately detect faults should a malfunction occur and allow system safety to be maintained. Renesas will provide safety analysis tools that can flexibly support a wide range of use cases to implement safe systems.
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