Renesas Electronics has developed the RX71M group as a new product line in the 32-bit RX microcontroller family. The series is designed for use in industrial devices and offers a CPU clock frequency of 240 MHz and up to 4 Mbytes of on-chip flash memory. There are a total of 112 product versions with package pin counts from 100 to 177 pins. To enable a smooth transition between the individual families within the product range, the RX71M group is backwards compatible with earlier RX family products in terms of peripheral functions, development tools and pin assignments. The group supports an extended list of communication interfaces beyond the CAN and SPI standards: the devices work with SD Host Interface, USB High Speed (integrated in PHY) as well as dual channel Ethernet according to IEEE 1588. In response to the increased security risks associated with communication standards, the product group includes encryption functions such as AES, DES, SHA and RNG integrated in hardware on the chip. Earlier MCUs contained protection functions to prevent program code from being read out after development. The new product group extends this protection to the actual development phase and uses a 'trusted memory' function that prevents important algorithms from being copied or read without authorization.