August 31, 2001 – Santa Clara, CA – NEC Electronics Inc. announced its V850ES/SA2 and SA3 microcontrollers. These new devices are the first to use the V850ES core and are optimized for low-power, battery-operated portable and handheld applications such as two-way radios and audio players, according to NEC.

The new compact V850ES core is built on the V850 family architecture and was designed to enable a wide range of low-power, high-performance products. “There has been an exponential increase in demand for power-efficient devices that operate on ultra-low voltages to maximize product usage time and reduce system size,” said Shige Ishikawa, assistant GM, System LSI, NEC Electronics. “The need for highly efficient microcontrollers to run large external memory and complex system LSIs is rapidly increasing. We have created these new products to meet these very specific requirements.”

To meet these needs, NEC has developed the V850ES/SA2 and V850ES/SA3 low-power products and plans to expand the V850 family product line-up by providing internal peripheral functions tailored for specific applications.

The new products feature ultra-low operating voltage (min. 2.2 volts) and low power consumption of only 30 megawatts (mW) at 2.5 volts, according to NEC. While maintaining a performance of 21 MIPS at 17 MHz, these devices provide a high-performance, low-power ratio of 700 MIPS per watt. These integrated products have 256 Kbytes (KB) of flash memory and can be reprogrammed from a single power supply, allowing the system to be easily evaluated and upgraded, NEC said. The V850ES/SA2 and V850ES/SA3 additionally come equipped with 256 KB of read-only memory (ROM) and 16 KB of random access memory (RAM).