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Renesas Launches Arm Cortex-M33-based RA6M4 MCU Group
October 2020 by Marc Jacob
Renesas Electronics Corporation announced the expansion of its RA6 Series microcontrollers (MCUs) with nine new RA6M4 Group MCUs, increasing the RA Family to 42 MCUs. These 32-bit MCUs boost operating performance up to 200 MHz using the Arm® Cortex®-M33 core based on Armv8-M architecture with Arm TrustZone® technology. The RA6M4 MCUs deliver optimized performance together with leading-edge security and connectivity supported by the easy-to-use Flexible Software Package (FSP). In addition, the Renesas partner ecosystem offers software and hardware building blocks that work out-of-the-box with RA6M4 MCUs and FSP to address Industrial 4.0, building automation, metering, healthcare, and home appliance applications.
With strong security, rich connectivity, large embedded RAM with parity/ECC, low power consumption, and leverage of the Arm developer and tools ecosystem, the RA6M4 MCUs speed the development of intelligent IoT edge and endpoint devices. Renesas’ enhanced Secure Crypto Engine delivers excellent security solutions, incorporating multiple symmetric and asymmetric cryptography accelerators, advanced key management, security lifecycle management, tamper detection, and increased resistance to side-channel attack, in addition to Arm TrustZone technology. These integrated security features make the RA6M4 MCUs the ideal choice for connected applications, and enable customers to realize lower BOM cost and secure element functionality in all their IoT designs.
Built on a highly efficient 40nm process, the RA6M4 MCUs drive power consumption down to 99uA/MHz while running the CoreMark algorithm from flash. The MCUs also support fast wakeup times of 30 µs from standby using a high-performance on-chip oscillator. Their high integration up to 1MB code flash memory and 256 KB of SRAM (64 KB with ECC) also make the RA6M4 MCUs well suited for low power and safety applications.
Key Features of the RA6M4 Group
• 200 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 with TrustZone technology
• Renesas’ Secure Crypto Engine as part of a full security solution
• Scalable from 64-pin to 144-pin LQFP packages
• Ethernet controller with DMA
• Capacitive touch sensing unit
• USB 2.0 Full Speed and CAN
• QuadSPI and OctaSPI memory interface, and advanced analog
• SCI (UART, Simple SPI, Simple I2C), and SPI/ I2C multimaster interface
• SDHI and SSI (Serial Sound Interface)
The RA6M4 with Flexible Software Package (FSP) allows customers to re-use their legacy code and combine it with software from partners across the vast Arm ecosystem to speed implementation of complex connectivity and security functions. The FSP includes FreeRTOS and middleware, 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 FSP provides a host of efficiency enhancing tools for developing projects targeting the RA6M4 MCUs. The e2 studio Integrated Development Environment provides a familiar development cockpit from which the key steps of project creation, module selection and configuration, code development, code generation, and debugging are all managed. FSP uses a GUI to simplify the process and dramatically accelerate the development process.
– Availability
The RA6M4 MCUs are available now from Renesas’ worldwide distributors.
