Renesas Electronics Europe achieved VDE (the German Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies) certification for its IEC60335-compliant self-test software aimed at its RX100 microcontroller (MCU) family. The free-of-charge software is available for download from the company’s Web site.
In addition to the on-chip hardware safety features, the self-test CPU software makes it easier for manufacturers of industrial, motor-control, and home appliances to meet IEC60730-1 (IEC60335) class B safety requirements. The safety standard requires software running on an MCU to be able to detect any safety critical failures according to specific fault models.
The RX100 MCU family integrates on-chip peripherals such as a cyclic-redundancy-check (CRC) engine and hardware clock-monitoring function to detect erroneous clock frequencies. Furthermore, a Data Operating Circuit (DOC) module reduces the RAM March X algorithm’s testing time and frees up the overall CPU load.