Renesas has an unmatched view of the global embedded systems market. We offer a massive lineup of MCUs, from low- to high-end. Our customers apply them in an amazing 10,000 new deployments a year in diverse areas, including the consumer, automotive, industrial, office automation and communications fields. In December 2008, we shipped over 1.5 billion flash MCUs and achieved the leading share in MCUs worldwide. This strong market position gives us valuable insights into industry trends. In particular, mainstream embedded system applications are becoming more complex and capable, offering greater functionality and performance. Various types of networking technologies are increasingly being applied, too. At the same time, new system designs are expected to be more energy efficient. At the MCU device level, these trends translate into a growing need for chips that can deliver faster speeds, higher processing power, and more on-chip peripheral functions, yet do so while consuming less power. Thus it isn't surprising that the heart of the MCU market is shifting. It has begun to move away from 8-bit devices towards 16 and 32-bit chips (see Figure 1-1, below) as customers' embedded system designs evolve. Fig. 1-1. Worldwide Microcontroller Market Scale Forecast
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To serve our global customer base and remain the world's leading supplier of MCUs, Renesas has developed the RX CPU architecture. It gives system engineers exciting new solutions to apply. The RX CPU invigorates our 16/32-bit MCU offerings - and indeed the entire MCU market - because it addresses the changing MCU requirements caused by system design trends. It offers higher performance, lower power consumption, greater code efficiency, more integration and compatibility with existing Renesas products. Figure 1.2 (below) shows how international market needs drove the development of the RX CPU architecture. Significantly, the RX CPU was designed from the outset to cope with another key fact of the electronics industry today: Development cycles for embedded system products are getting shorter. As a result, turnaround times for new MCU designs must shrink commensurately to maintain industry momentum. Rapid innovation in the RX family is enabled by Renesas' new 'MCU Development Platform' that provides compatibility with existing products. It smoothly facilitates product releases while also aiding inter-product migration. Our MCU platform is an advanced R&D tool based on technology that we have nurtured in the system-on-chip (SoC) field and previously applied to MPU development in the form of the EXREAL Platform. As Figure 1-2 shows, the RX family offers truly next-generation 16/32-bit, mid-range MCUs. These devices possess features that far exceed existing products in terms of basic processing performance, code efficiency, power consumption and integration. Yet they still provide compatibility with existing Renesas products. Also, the RX product line benefits from our substantial R&D capabilities, which can respond quickly to changing market needs and the evolution of technology - thereby sustaining our customers' ongoing system development projects and facilitating our company's long-term sales growth. Fig. 1-2. Market Needs and Resulting Performance of the RX MCU 
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Development of the RX family
