Renesas Technology was formed on April 2003 as a joint venture between Hitachi, Ltd. and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. Renesas inherited three main architectures in this transaction; two CISC based architectures called M16C and H8, and one RISC architecture called the SuperH (also known as SH). This course will focus strictly on the left side of this chart, which is the M16C architecture. Starting at the bottom, the R8C, the focus family for 8-bit applications, has a maximum speed of 20MHz and is only available with flash memory. The next step up is the mid range M16C which mainly focuses on 16-bit applications, while the 32-bit R32C family runs up to 50 MHz and includes a single precision floating point unit. All three families are software compatible and share common peripherals. Although 8-bit MCU solutions are offered from both the M16C and H8 architectures, Renesas' investment is focused around the R8C family.