Renesas configures MCU for automotive radar processing
The first RH850-based, 32-bit, automotive radar microcontroller (MCU) series, the RH850/V1R, includes a digital signal processorand high speed serial interfaces and is specifically designed for middle- to long-range radars. Software and tools including evaluation boards will also be available.
Radar sensors, Renesas notes, are required for ADAS applications, including advanced emergency braking and adaptive cruise control. High precision sensing becomes critical in realizing future autonomous driving to meet the increasing requirements of range resolution, separation of objects and precision in measurement of velocity. This requires increased numbers of antennas and boosting of the signal processing performance.
The RH850/V1R-M MCU has ben designed for radar applications in ADAS, with optimized, programmable digital signal processing, a dual core running at 320 MHz with 2 MB of high speed flash, and 2 MB internal RAM, while meeting the industry’s highest temperature requirements.
The MCU is designed to have optimized hardware acceleration in the DSP. The optimized DSP allows the system developers to process the raw data into target objects efficiently, separately from the safety relevant classification and tracking done in the CPUs. Renesas’ high performance DSP performs radar specific algorithms such as fast Fourier transforms, beamforming, windowing, channel calibration, peak search, at high speed and with low power consumption. The DSP offers high flexible programmability and Renesas specifically developed a DSP math library for automotive radar sensors to support system developers in their algorithm development.
The RH850/V1R-M is built in Renesas’ 40-nm embedded flash (eFlash) process technology, for which the company claims a track record in terms of re-write cycles, fastest random access operation speeds and high reliability. It also has the merit of low power consumption as the transistors are smaller lowering parasitic capacitances. The process specification of RH850/V1R-M also fulfils the highest temperature requirements in the industry (T-junction 150°C). The embedded flash offers higher integration using less PCB space and better real time behavior.
The MCU features two G3MH CPU cores operating at 320 MHz and are the highest performance cores in the RH850 Family. The G3MH is a superscalar reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture with two 7-stage integer pipelines, which allows execution of two different instructions at the same time. Each G3MH core achieves the performance of 3.2 DMIPS/MHz. By incorporating a large 2 MB capacity RAM, the RH850/V1R-M handles all specific calculations on radar cube data such as range and velocity FFTs, digital beam forming, constant false alarm rate (CFAR) and peak detection. (CFAR detection refers to adaptive algorithms used in radar applications to detect target returns against a background of noise.)
Samples of the RH850/V1R-M and the DSP math library will be available from second half of 2017. Mass production is scheduled to begin in November 2018. A flexible programmable complete toolchain with C/C++ compiler, debugger, simulation models and detailed performance profiling tools will also be available.
YouTube videos about Renesas’ commitment to ADAS and Autonomous Drive and Renesas Radar Solution RH850/V1R-M are available at; https://youtu.be/pDrBafZ-nPI and https://youtu.be/K9i_yle-YgM
Renesas; www.renesas.eu
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