Renesas Electronics America Announces V850 Microcontroller Demonstration Platform for Continua®-Certified Blood Glucose Meter Agent

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Renesas Electronics America Inc., a premier provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced the availability of a Continua® demonstration platform based on the Renesas Electronics V850 energy-efficient microcontroller (MCU) with certified Continua Blood Glucose agent software. Implementing a blood glucose meter as defined by the Continua Health Alliance, the platform shows how the V850 MCUs implement complete software functionality at a level of power efficiency that ensures long battery life. As medical devices such as blood glucose meters gain enhanced connectivity in compliance with Continua guidelines, the energy-efficient V850 MCUs, at about 350uA/DMIPS with up to 1 megabyte (MB) of flash memory and integrated USB function support, make it possible to handle the added software load without sacrificing the long battery life that end users have come to expect.

“This Continua demo is a great example, illustrating how an energy-efficient MCU and a fast time-to-market software solution can assist our medical customers develop state-of-the-art connected medical devices.”

Low-power, high-performance microcontrollers enable Continua healthcare devices to store time-stamped measurements and automatically send the data to healthcare professionals. By eliminating the error-prone process of manually collecting such measurement data, Continua devices help improve the quality of medical data and the diagnosis.

The challenge in implementing these devices is that collecting and communicating the data adds a significant software burden to existing medical products. This software burden could become a human burden if the people who use these devices every day have to replace batteries frequently.

The Renesas Electronics 32-bit V850ES/Jx3-L MCUs relieve this burden with an extraordinarily high energy efficiency — 1.9 DMIPS/MHz — which enables the V850 devices to process more than other MCUs at a lower frequency. In addition to minimizing power consumption, low-frequency operation reduces the possibility of electromagnetic interference (EMI). With up to 1 MB of flash memory, the V850 devices have plenty of capacity to accommodate evolving standards for connected portable medical devices. The V850 MCUs also integrate USB support and a variety of other peripheral functions.

“To help our medical customers, Renesas Electronics continues to develop solutions to tackle the challenges of implementing new technologies,” said Ritesh Tyagi, Director of Microcontroller Products & Solutions marketing at Renesas Electronics America. “This Continua demo is a great example, illustrating how an energy-efficient MCU and a fast time-to-market software solution can assist our medical customers develop state-of-the-art connected medical devices.”

Industry-Standard Implementation

The Renesas Electronics V850 Continua demonstration platform implements a set of guidelines for blood glucose meters developed by the Continua Health Alliance — a non-profit industry organization dedicated to establishing connected and interoperable personal health solutions. Alliance guidelines utilize key industry standards to ensure an end-to-end architecture from personal medical devices to hospital information systems. One such standard is ISO/IEEE 11073, which defines a medical device, the measurements that it makes, and a protocol for communicating the measurement data. For the underlying communication transport method, the Continua guidelines specify open standards such as USB, Bluetooth® and ZigBee®.

While the Continua demonstration platform uses USB, the V850ES/Jx3-L MCUs can also support Bluetooth and ZigBee functionality. Further, the demonstration platform implements an optional persistent metric store (PM Store) to support off-line storage of measurement data. This PM Store enables a medical device to save measurement data until the device can connect to a network and automatically send the data.

The Renesas Electronics V850 Continua demonstration platform runs software from Lamprey Networks Inc. (http://www.lampreynetworks.com/), the developer of the reference code for the Continua Health Alliance. The software used in the platform has been certified by the Continua Health Alliance and is portable across multiple Renesas Electronics MCUs. Because the software is targeted to a specific type of medical device, the software footprint can be optimized.

In addition to the software that specifically supports the requirements of blood glucose meters, Lamprey Networks offers software for other types of medical devices, such as blood pressure monitors. Product developers can leverage this software to reduce time to market, as well as reducing the overhead involved in learning, and implementing and testing code developed from scratch. The V850 demonstration platform thus opens an immediate opportunity for companies that want to address the new market for Continua healthcare devices.

More information can be found at www.am.renesas.com/continua and at the Continua Alliance web site, www.continuaalliance.org/products/productshowcase.html .

Availability

The Continua Demonstration Platform for Renesas Electronics V850 MCUs is available now. To request a demonstration, visit www.am.renesas.com/continua and complete the e-mail address field.

About Renesas Electronics America Inc.

Renesas Electronics America Inc., headquartered in Santa Clara, California, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723), the world's number one supplier of microcontrollers and a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions including microcontrollers, SoC solutions, and a broad range of analog and power devices. In the Americas, Renesas Electronics America markets and sells industrial-type active-matrix LCD modules from NEC LCD Technologies, Ltd., a global leader in innovative display technologies. More information can be found at http://www.am.renesas.com/.

Continua is a registered trademark of the Continua Health Alliance. Bluetooth is a registered trademark of the Bluetooth SIG.

ZigBee is a registered trademark of the ZigBee Alliance.