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Semiconductor History | NEC Tamagawa — 78K0S Shrinks Control to a Handful of Pins
· 2006-7
Personal memoryBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Semiconductor History | NEC Tamagawa — 78K0S Shrinks Control to a Handful of Pins
kevin
7/13/2006
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NEC Electronics expanded its 78K0S/Kx1+ flash-microcontroller line on July 13, 2006 with ten devices aimed at inexpensive control work. Three used ten-pin packages measuring 4.4 by 3.72 millimetres, while seven offered 16, 20, or 30 pins and omitted an analog-to-digital converter where the application did not need one.
The smallest products carried one to four kilobytes of flash. NEC pitched the broader group at switches, lights, heaters, motors, pumps, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, microwave ovens, and other machines whose intelligence consisted largely of sensing a state and turning something on or off.
The good was precision in what customers did not have to buy. On-chip flash allowed code changes without replacing the processor, while a menu of memory sizes, pin counts, and peripheral options let an engineer trade board area and component cost against the exact control task.
NEC said the ten-pin package used about 30 percent less board space than the preceding 16-pin option. The company's surviving catalogs also show how far the packaging work went: one 78K0S/KY1+ version placed sixteen contacts beneath a package only about two by 2.3 millimetres.
The bad was that small hardware did not mean small verification work. Two days before the product announcement, NEC issued a restriction for the same low-pin-count families requiring a particular register clear and instruction sequence to avoid a malfunction when flash self-programming and the HALT standby function were repeatedly combined.
That notice is the useful counterweight to the miniature package. Cheap microcontrollers spread computation into ordinary appliances, but each new memory option, package, development tool, and firmware path also created another configuration that had to be documented and tested.
Renesas inherited the 78K line when NEC Electronics joined Renesas Electronics in 2010. Its current product pages classify these parts as legacy devices not recommended for new designs, while preserving the manuals and technical notices that kept long-lived equipment serviceable.
The pin uses NEC's verified Tamagawa semiconductor-campus anchor and matches the announcement's Kawasaki dateline; it does not claim to identify the product team's room. The cover combines a real NEC 78K0S package photograph with scale drawings and a six-pin comparison package.
Sources: NEC Electronics 78K0S/Kx1+ product announcement of July 13, 2006; NEC technical restriction ZBG-CC-06-0028 of July 11, 2006; NEC 78K0S/KY1+ preliminary product information and Renesas legacy catalog; Renesas 78K0S instruction and application manuals; NEC/Renesas corporate-lineage records.
Photo: “BGA16 and SOT23-6,” NobbiP, CC BY-SA 3.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BGA16_and_SOT23-6.jpg
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