NEC Electronics Intros 32-Bit V850E2/ME3 MCU

NEC Electronics Corp. (Japan) introduced its new V850E2/ME3™ microcontroller (MCU), a 32-bit single-chip RISC controller suitable for inverters, industrial equipment, printers and digital consumer products. The V850E2/ME3 chip is the latest addition to NEC Electronics' V850™ MCU family.

The V850E2/ME3 MCU features the new V850E2™ CPU core that enables processing speeds of 400 million instructions per second (MIPS) at up to 200 MHz. The V850E2 microcontroller also enables 90% improvement in processing speed over previous versions with its simultaneous processing of two instructions sets using a single clock. The 168 KB, high-speed instruction RAM, which is 40 KB more than the previous core, as well as an 8 KB instruction cache and 8 KB data cache, enable real-time processing of large data volumes, making the V850E2/ME3 MCU suitable for printers and other applications.

Samples of the V850E2/ME3 MCU will be available March 1, 2005, priced at $22. Volume production is scheduled to begin during July 2005, and monthly production volumes are expected to reach 200,000 units per month by March 2006. Pricing and availability are subject to change without notice.