Renesas streamlines its ARM Cortex M85 microcontrollers
Renesas Electrnics has launched two families of microcontroller with the ARM Cortex-M85 high performance core for cost-sensitive AI and IoT applications.
The RA8E1 and RA8E2 microcontroller (MCU) groups are aimed at industrial and home automation, office equipment, healthcare, and consumer products for AIoT where high performance is crucial to execute AI models.
Renesas has developed reference designs for an Entry Level Voice & Vision AI System and Human Machine Interface (HMI) for Appliances using the devices.
The RA8 Series was the first to implement the ARM Cortex-M85 core with performance of 6.39 Coremark/MHz1 performance. The RA8E1 and RA8E2 MCUs offer the same performance but with a streamlined feature set that reduces costs.
Renesas ships its ARM Cortex-M85 microcontroller to leapfrog M7
The 360MHz RA8E1 and 480MHz RA8E2 MCUs use the ARM Helium technology with M-Profile Vector Extension that provides up to a for times the performance for digital signal processor (DSP) and machine learning (ML) implementations compared to the M7 devices.
RA8 Series devices integrate low power features and multiple low power modes to improve power efficiency, even while providing industry-leading performance. A combination of low power modes, independent power domains, lower voltage range, fast wakeup time and low typical active and standby currents enables lower overall system power and allows customers to lower overall system power consumption and meet regulatory requirements.
The 360MHz RA8E1 devices are in 100/144 LQFP packaging and have up to 1MB Flash, 544 KB SRAM (including 32KB TCM w/ ECC, 512KB user SRAM with parity protection), 1KB standby SRAM, 32KB I/D caches. Peripherals include Ethernet, XSPI (Octal SPI), SPI, I2C, USBFS, CAN-FD, SSI, ADC 12bit, DAC 12bit, HSCOMP, temperature sensor, 8bit CEU, GPT, LP-GPT, WDT and RTC.
The RA8E2 MCUs is in a BGA 224 package and boosts the clock to 480 MHz with more SRAM at 672 KB SRAM (including 32KB TCM w/ ECC, 512KB user SRAM with parity protection+128 KB additional user SRAM), 1KB standby SRAM, 32KB I/D caches. Extra peripherals include a 16bit external memory interface.
The RA8 Series MCUs are supported by Renesas’ Flexible Software Package (FSP). The FSP enables faster application development by providing all the infrastructure software needed, including multiple RTOS, BSP, peripheral drivers, middleware, connectivity, networking, and TrustZone support as well as reference software to build complex AI, motor control and cloud solutions. It allows customers to integrate their own legacy code and choice of RTOS with FSP, thus providing full flexibility in application development. Using the FSP will ease migration of existing designs to the new RA8 Series devices.
“Our customers love the superior performance of the RA8 MCUs and are now looking for more feature optimized versions combined with high performance for their cost-sensitive industrial, vision AI and mid-end graphics applications,” said Daryl Khoo, Vice President of Embedded Processing Business Division at Renesas. “The RA8E1 and RA8E2 deliver the right balance of performance and features for those markets and, with FSP, enable easy migration within the RA8 Series or from RA6 MCUs.”
The RA8E1 and RA8E2 Group MCUs are available now, along with the FSP software. Renesas is also shipping a Fast Prototyping Board for the RA8E1 and will offer an RA8E2 Evaluation Kit including a TFT Display in early Q1 2025.
The Entry Level Voice & Vision AI System and Human Machine Interface (HMI) for Appliances reference designs are technically vetted system architectures to bring an optimized, low-risk design for faster time to market.
renesas.com/RA8E1; renesas.com/RA8E2
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