Renesas Electronics America Highlights Embedded Technologies Enabling the Smart Society with Demos, Sessions and Labs at DevCon 2012

SANTA CLARA, Calif., October 8, 2012 — Renesas Electronics America, a premier provider of advanced semiconductor solutions will kick off the Renesas Electronics DevCon 2012 on October 22-25, 2012 in Orange County, Calif. Highlighting the company’s expertise across the signal chain, this year’s event will focus on “Enabling the Smart Society” and Renesas, along with technology partners, will showcase a broad range of technologies and products – across several applications – that allow people to interact with their electronics more efficiently, conveniently, safely and with greater intelligence and intuition. This year’s DevCon will also feature hundreds of hours of lectures and hands-on labs on an array of technologies and application topics as well as discussion forums.

Response for the biennial event has been tremendous, with registration is up over 25 percent compared with DevCon 2010. In a world where “virtual” training has become the norm, and attendance at industry-wide tradeshows is in decline, the tremendous response to the Renesas DevCon reinforces the value engineers find in hands-on labs, face-to-face training opportunities and interactive access to Renesas’ technology experts and partners from around the world.

Product and Technology Demonstrations

• Smart Analog Technology: Highlighting the use of a single Smart Analog IC connected to a low-power Renesas MCU, the RL78, to support 11 different sensors such as a gyro sensor, a photodiode, a pressure sensor, a RGB color sensor, a thermistor, and others. A powerful and intuitive PC-based configuration tool makes it easy to customize and debug the analog front end (AFE) behavior to the sensor requirements, including changing gain values, performing offset tuning, employing low-pass filter circuitry and more.
• High Voltage Inverter Using IGBTs: Showcasing Renesas’ MCU and power device expertise in the form of an end-to-end motor control solution that demonstrates the 32-bit RX62T MCU and D series of IGBTs in action. The demo will highlight the IGBTs’ fast recovery and robust performance capabilities, combined with the intelligence of the RX62T MCU. In addition, it will highlight the high voltage inverter board, which features an interleaved power factor correction (PFC) stage that offers flexibility to evaluate an analog PFC solution or digital PFC using RX62T.
• Dual Motor Control: Demonstrating the RX600 Motor Kit – a versatile platform that helps meet evaluation and development needs – as it connects to an external inverter and drives two 3-phase BLDC motors simultaneously using sensorless vector control. The demonstration features Renesas' RX62T MCU.
• Debugging and Tuning Tools: Showcasing Renesas’ RL78 MCU as it drives a 1-phase AC induction motor using V/F control while using In-circuit Scope (ICS) for debugging. The ICS’ features, including the capture and display of embedded parameters on a screen, will highlight its value as a useful tool for debugging and tuning motor systems.
• RL78 Motor Control Kit: Highlighting the RL78 Motor Control Kit, which features Renesas’ RL78/G14 low-power MCU. The demonstration will showcase the RL78 MCU driving a 3-phase BLDC motor using sensorless vector control. The new Test Mode, which helps tune the current loop parameters using an external oscilloscope, and other key features will be on display. Users who wish to quickly run their own motor using the kit will be able to see the benefits of this cost-effective motor control solution.
• Smart Health: Highlighting home and commercial healthcare products that support the Continua software to enable patient/doctor information exchange. Demonstrations include single MCU device configurations as well as paired MCU configurations, both showing how data is collected and sent through the internet to Microsoft Health Vault. A Renesas ANT+ demo pairs a low-power RL78 MCU with an ANT+ radio module, showcasing the advantages of this low-power combination for portable healthcare devices that help patients track and manage fitness and personal health more effectively.
• Sensor Fusion: Using the RX62N RDK, which contains an accelerometer and an add-on daughter board that contains a gyroscope, this demo will showcase how combining input from two or more types of sensors can provide for more accurate reading when using the integrated DSP and Floating Point hardware of the RX62N MCU to process the sensor fusion algorithm in real time with minimal loading on the CPU.
• Wi-Fi Connectivity: Showcasing the Renesas RL78/G14 RDK with integrated Gainspan GS1011M 802.11b Wi-Fi module to demonstrate low-power Wi-Fi connectivity to the cloud through multiple mode support. The demonstration will feature the Wi-Fi module in web server mode and an iPhone app with widgets showing data from the light sensor, accelerometer and the temperature sensor. In the web server mode, the module provides the sensor data collected by the Renesas MCU to any Wi-Fi client that’s connected to the module. This demonstration will take place in Gainspan’s booth (#16).

Lectures and Labs

As part of the company’s commitment to continued innovation and education, Renesas Electronics America will host a series of lectures and hands-on labs led by various experts from Renesas and partner companies. Attendees will have a chance to learn about Renesas and partner products and design processes for automotive, HMI, the cloud, M2M, connectivity, power, motor control, and other areas. More information on the available courses is available here: http://www.renesasdevcon.com/course.html.

Registration for Renesas DevCon is open now, but space is limited. To register or for the latest event details and activities, visit Renesas Electronics DevCon 2012, follow @RenesasAmerica on Twitter or join the DevCon community on Facebook.

About Renesas Electronics America Inc.

Renesas Electronics America Inc., headquartered in Santa Clara, California, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723), the world's number one supplier of microcontrollers and a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions including microcontrollers, SoC solutions, and a broad range of analog and power devices. In the Americas, Renesas Electronics America markets and sells industrial-type active-matrix LCD modules from NEC LCD Technologies, Ltd., a global leader in innovative display technologies. More information about the products offered by Renesas Electronics America can be found at www.renesas.com.

The content in the press release, including, but not limited to, product prices and specifications, is based on the information as of the date indicated on the document, but may be subject to change without prior notice.