Renesas Electronics has produced its first microcontroller (MCU) based on advanced 22-nm process technology.

The company, which employed state-of-the-art process technology, is now able to provide customers with improved levels of performance at lower power consumption driven by reduced core voltages. Integrated Circuit Chip

The advanced process technology also offers the ability to integrate a much richer feature set including functions such as RF. In addition, the advanced process node uses a smaller die area for the same functionality, resulting in smaller chips with higher integration of peripherals and memory.

The first chip produced on the new 22-nm process is an extension to Renesas’ RA family of 32-bit Arm Cortex-M microcontrollers. This wireless MCU delivers Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy (LE) with the integration of a software-defined radio (SDR). It offers a future-proof solution for customers building products targeting a long lifetime - the devices can be upgraded either with new application software or new Bluetooth capabilities to assure compliance to the latest specification versions.

End product manufacturers will be able to leverage the full feature set of previous Bluetooth LE specification releases.

According to Renesas, whether designing devices for direction-finding applications utilising the Bluetooth 5.1 Angle of Arrival (AoA)/Angle of Departure (AoD) features or adding low power stereo audio transmission to products by employing Bluetooth 5.2 isochronous channels, developers will now only need one device to support them.

Extensive Semiconductor Commenting on the announcement Roger Wendelken, Senior Vice President in Renesas’ IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit said, “Our first 22-nm product development in the RA MCU family will pave the way for next generation devices that will help customers to future proof their design while ensuring long term availability.”