Renesas single chip for nine axis robotics
Renesas Electronics has developed a single chip to control the 9 axis latest robotic systems.
“The RZ/T2H is for industrial robots and AGVs and AMRs with a very efficient subsystem with real time CPUs for multiaxis motor control up to 9 axis and multiple protocols,” said Knut Dettmer director business development embedded at Renesas.
“What’s really key is the high level of integration, which makes it easier to secure from boot, with a single chip rather than three or four chips and FPGAs with a more expensive and complex system design,” he said.
The RZ/T2H has four ARM Cortex A55 1.2GHz processor cores as the application cluster with two R52 core with 576Kbytes of tightly coupled memory for the real time motor control and network stacks. There are also nine specialist embedded encoder interfaces with three phase pulse width modulation (PWM) and sigma delta data converters for each motor.
“One of our strengths has been using a low latency bus to access all the peripherals so the speed of the processor subsystem doesn’t show the performance of the system. What we do is optimise the complete system, the register access time, the clocking of peripherals, the low latency peripheral port (LLPP) bus, with accelerator for trigonometric functions for the motor control. What really makes a difference is that optimisation.”
The chip also has 2MB of system SRAM and four Ethernet ports, three Gigabit Ethernet MAC (GMAC), plus an Ethernet switch. It also supports EtherCAT, PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, OPC UA, and the next-generation Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) standard. The combination of these Ethernet switches and GMAC allows the MPU to support multiple Industrial Ethernet controllers and devices, providing flexibility to adapt to a wide range of controller requirements, such as upper-layer Ethernet communications.
The RZ/T2H comes with the Renesas Flexible Software Package (FSP) together with a Linux package that comes with long term support and FreeRTOS for the R52 cores. An out-of-the-box multi-axis motor control evaluation board is available including inverter boards for driving 9-axis motors, a multi-axis motor control software package, and Motion Utility Tool (a motor control software tool). Sample protocols for industrial Ethernet and software PLC package are also included to kick-start system development.
A variant of the chip, the N2H, has only one encoder interface for decentralised architecture with a controller in each motor as well as motion controllers and programmable logic controllers.
The chips include security elements to help developer meet the European regulations in the Cyber Resilience Act. This includes secure boot with individual key for chip using Renesas Secure IP and cryptographic extensions in the A55 cores for high performance stream cypher
“Typically if you want some connections secure such as a key exchange you would use the secure IP. If you want to stream data you would use the accelerator in the A55,” said Dettmer.
The chip does not have an AI accelerator block.
“We use Reality AI algorithms for common motor control AI such as predictive maintenance and unbalanced load but this is not neural networks, we use other techniques and this can be incorporated into the R52 cores,” said Dettmer.
Renesas has developed a reference design for a 9-axis Industrial Motor Control with Ethernet that combines the RZ/T2H with numerous compatible devices such as the RV1S9231A IGBT Drive Photocoupler and RV1S9353A Optically Isolated Delta-Sigma Modulator.
The nine channel T2H is available now and the single N2H variant will be available in January 2025.
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