Described as the flagship of the RX 32bit microcontroller series, the RX71M Group has been developed by Renesas for use in industrial equipment. It doubles the CPU operating frequency to 240MHz from that of previous products and is available with up to 4Mbyte of on-chip flash memory.
M2M communication in industrial equipment has created demand for MCUs that are optimised for a range of performance levels, from sensor nodes operating at around 30MHz to controllers operating at 200MHz and above, and also for scalability in order to reduce the man-hours required for software and hardware development.
Industrial customers are developing systems and finding they need to protect their software resources, without risking customer’s own core technologies (such as important algorithms) via leaks or unauthorised duplication.
Industrial equipment demands real-time performance for the sequence of processing steps, from data input to arithmetic processing to output of results. In this series, there are 112 products, available with package pin counts ranging from 100 to 177 pins and on-chip flash memory capacities from two to 4Mbyte.
Maximum operating frequency is increased to 240MHz, for a scalable range of products that contributes to reduced product development time and cost, says the company. The 240MHz operating frequency translates to performance of CoreMark/MHz of 4.4 at 240MHz, which is claimed to be among the best in the industry among flash microcontrollers.
The RX71M maintains backward compatibility with earlier RX products in aspects such as peripheral functions, development tools, and pin assignments. The RXv2 core delivers approximately 1.3 times the performance of the earlier RXv1 core. It maintains code compatibility (backward compatibility) with the RXv1, for software portability.
Drivers with support for Firmware Integration Technology (FIT) make porting software between RX microcontrollers easier, says the company. Development time and cost can be reduced by up to 50% when porting program code between RX products.
Expanded functionality brings more diverse communication interfaces and development for the Internet of Things (IoT). To support the diversity of communication standards accompanying the IoT, the microcontrollers support CAN and SPI communication interfaces and also include SD Host Interface, USB High Speed (built into the PHY), and dual-channel Ethernet with IEEE 1588 support. This provides the connectivity with a wide variety of devices demanded in today’s industrial equipment, says the company.
High-speed encryption functions (AES, DES, SHA, and RNG) are implemented in on-chip hardware to protect against leaks of data and communication data. The devices not only prevent code stored in the on-chip flash memory from being read by external devices, but also protects algorithms from being leaked or copied without authorisation. The trusted memory function sets aside a special area of memory from which code cannot be read (copied) even by the internal modules of the microcontroller, such as the on-chip flash memory.
According to the company, up to 45% reduction in BoM cost and double the performance of earlier products is realized, using the company’s high-speed flash technology and large on-chip memory capacity.
The microcontrollers are supported with e2 studio, Eclipse-based IDE, as well as compilers, debuggers, code generation tools, and flash programmers. They are also supported by the IAR Embedded Workbench for Renesas RX compiler and integrated development environment (IDE). RTOS and middleware is available from third-party companies such as Micrium, Segger, CMX, Express Logic, RoweBots, port GmbH and FreeRTOS.
Samples of the RX71M MCUs are available now. Mass production is scheduled to begin in June 2015.
http://www.renesas.eu
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