Low-power MCUs with new capacitive touch unit now available

Mouser now stocks the RL78/G23 microcontroller from Renesas Electronics. The microcontroller is compatible with its RL78 family of microcontrollers, giving engineers improved 16-bit performance and lower power consumption for many consumer and IIoT applications.

Using new processes and functionality, the microcontroller expands peripheral features and efficiency while reducing power consumption, making it ideal for various applications, from home appliances and consumer electronics to industrial automation. The device only consumes 44µA/MHz at CPU operation and 210nA in STOP mode (with 4Kbytes of SRAM retention), providing improved performance than current series microcontrollers. A newly implemented snooze mode sequencer makes it irrelevant to activate the CPU while peripheral operations are in snooze mode, noticeably improving efficiency for applications that need intermittent operation.

The device offers a wide operating voltage range of 1.6V to 5.5V up to 32MHz, with 768Kbytes of on-chip flash memory capacity. The device’s logic and event link controller makes it feasible to create conditional links to multiple events while continuing to benefit from the decreased power consumption achieved by the conventional event link controller. The family’s first capacitive touch-sensing unit (CTSU2L) combines outstanding high-sensitivity and low-noise characteristics, which can be employed to implement a contactless gesture-based user interface, excellent for consumer and industrial control surfaces.

The RL78/G23 Fast Prototyping Board, also available, is created for prototyping multiple applications using the microcontroller. The board is supplied as standard with Arduino Uno and Grove interfaces for simplified programming and allows high scalability with access to all pins on the microcontroller.