32-bit Arm Cortex-M MCUs feature advanced security for IoT
To support the new family, Renesas Electronics has built a comprehensive partner ecosystem to deliver an array of software and hardware building blocks that will work out of the box with RA MCUs. The RA Family ecosystem will help accelerate the development of IoT applications with core technologies such as security, safety, connectivity and HMI. The RA Family is PSA Certified Level 1 and includes the RA2 Series (up to 60 MHz), RA4 Series (up to 100 MHz), RA6 Series (up to 200 MHz), and the dual-core RA8 Series, to be released later.
“RA MCUs offer customers the ultimate IoT security by combining our Secure Crypto Engine IP with NIST CAVP certifications on top of Arm TrustZone for Armv8-M, while also providing tamper detection and reinforcing resistance to side-channel attacks,” explains Roger Wendelken, Senior Vice President of Renesas’ IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit.
“Scalability and compatibility across the RA Family lets customers build a range of products, and they can quickly begin development with our flexible software package using Amazon FreeRTOS, ThreadX, or other RTOS and middleware solutions.”
The first five RA MCU Groups available today are comprised of 32 scalable MCUs with Arm Cortex-M4 and Cortex-M23 processor cores. They feature pin counts of 32-pins to 176-pins, along with 256 KB to 2 MB of code flash memory, 32 KB to 640 KB SRAM, and connectivity such as USB, CAN and Ethernet. It is easy to transition within the RA Family thanks to feature and pin compatibility. Each RA MCU Group provides superior active and standby power, and enhanced features such as Renesas’ popular HMI capacitive touch technology.
The RA Family FSP provides an open architecture that allows customers to re-use their legacy code and combine it with software examples from Renesas and ecosystem partners to speed implementation of complex functions like connectivity and security. The FSP features Amazon FreeRTOS and will also add out-of-box support for ThreadX RTOS and middleware on Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33 MCUs by early 2020, offering a premium device-to-cloud option for developers. These out-of-box options can be easily replaced and expanded with any other RTOS or middleware.
The RA Family roadmap will roll out additional MCUs in 2020 with more advanced technologies, unique features, and a growing partner ecosystem. The first wave of RA devices incorporates hardware-based security features from simple AES acceleration to fully-integrated crypto subsystems isolated within the MCU. The Secure Crypto Engine provides symmetric and asymmetric encryption and decryption, hash functions, true random number generation (TRNG), and advanced key handling, including key generation and MCU-unique key wrapping. An access management circuit shuts down the crypto engine if the correct access protocol is not followed, and dedicated RAM ensures that plaintext keys are never exposed to any CPU or peripheral bus. The RA Family development environment offers on-chip debug, IDEs, compiler, support tools, board evaluation kits, design files, schematics, PCB layouts and BOM.
Renesas Electronics – www.renesas.com
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