As a response to recent environmental issues, the regulations on car performance (CO2 emissions, fuel efficiency, and exhaust gasses) in countries around the world are becoming increasingly stricter. As a result, support for new engine control methods is required in the power train area. Furthermore, ADAS (Advanced Driving Assistant System) is now desired to create a safe, secure, and comfortable automotive experience. To respond to these market needs, further increases in performance, and even lower power consumption, are required in the automotive MCUs.

As Renesas announced in its press release issued on February 18, 2014, Renesas has been moving forward with the development of eFlash memory for MCUs that is based on the SG-MONOS structure, which has a proven track record in terms of high reliability, high speed, and low power. At the same time as moving from the 40 nm process to the industry's leading-edge 28 nm process, this new technology makes even larger memory capacities and even higher processing performance possible through Renesas' superlative circuit technologies.

Renesas has now prototyped both a 4 MB program storage eFlash memory and a 64 KB data storage eFlash memory using a 28 nm eFlash memory process and has achieved the industry's highest readout operation speed of 6.4 GB/s at over 200 MHz. Although previously, Renesas had verified read operations at 160 MHz in a prototype chip fabricated in the 40 nm process, Renesas has now verified 25 percent characteristics improvements thanks to this new technology.

Also, in order to meet the requirement of the higher write performance in accordance with the increase in the size of the program storage eFlash memory, Renesas has achieved the industry's highest write throughput of 2.0 MB/s. This corresponds to almost twice as high performance characteristics as the conventional Renesas products fabricated in the 40 nm generation process technology.