Renesas Technology Europe has made available the H8/38327F series of ‘low cost, low power’ 5V operation microcontrollers with integrated Flash memory. The series is intended for applications needing 5V operation with low power consumption, such as metering, data logging and sensors. It also has an on-chip LCD controller that can show up to 128 segments for simple display.
The H8/38327F series incorporates either 32 or 60kb of on-chip Flash memory to enable greater flexibility in programming the chip, once sourced. The series includes a 16Mhz, 8-bit CPU that can execute 16-bit addition in 250ns and an 8-bit multiply in 1.75µs.
To ensure that the H8/38327F series uses as little power as possible, it has an integrated 32kHz sub-oscillator that can support a range of low power modes. In addition, the start-up time for the main oscillator is about 20µs, approximately 100 times faster than the average 2 to 3ms time taken by most oscillators. This has a dramatic impact on the amount of power required to start the main oscillator, reducing the size of the battery required or alternatively boosting the life of a standard battery.
The H8/38327F series integrates an asynchronous counter designed to count external pulses while it is in any low power mode, so pulses can be counted while minimising current drain. The H8/38327F series is supported by the Renesas Technology E8 on-chip debugger, giving users access to debug features the company says are normally only found on full emulators.