V850

V850 is a 32-bit RISC CPU architecture produced by Renesas Electronics for embedded microcontrollers. It was designed by NEC as a replacement for their earlier NEC V60 family, and was introduced shortly before NEC sold their designs to Renesas in the early 1990s. It has continued to be developed by Renesas as of 2018^[update].

The V850 architecture is a load/store architecture with 32 32-bit general-purpose registers. It features a compressed instruction set with the most frequently used instructions mapped onto 16-bit half-words.

Intended for use in ultra-low power consumption systems, such as those using 0.5 mW/MIPS, the V850 has been widely used in a variety of applications, including optical disk drives, hard disk drives, mobile phones, car audio, and inverter compressors for air conditioners. Today, microarchitectures primarily focus on high performance and high reliability, such as the dual-lockstep redundant mechanism for the automotive industry; and the V850 and RH850 families are comprehensively used in cars.

The V850/RH850 microcontrollers are also used prominently on non-Japanese automobile marques such as Chevrolet, Chrysler, Dodge, Ford, Hyundai, Jeep, Kia, Opel, Range Rover, Renault and Volkswagen Group brands.

The V850 is the trademark name for a 32-bit RISC CPU architecture for embedded microcontrollers of Renesas Electronics Corporation. It was originally developed and manufactured by NEC Corporation in the early 1990s (the copyright mark for the microcode on the package shows 1991) as a branch of the V800 Series and is still being evolved today.

Its base-architecture has been succeeded by the V850 family variants, named V850E, V850E1, V850ES, V850E1F, V850E2, V850E2M, V850E2S, and the RH850 family (V850E2M, V850E2S, and V850E3) CPU cores.

Many compilers and debuggers are available from various development tool vendors.

Real-time operating systems are provided by compiler vendors.