The R9A02G021 group of MCUs provides embedded systems designers with a clear path to developing a wide range of power-conscious, cost-sensitive applications based on the open-source instruction set architecture (ISA).
While most of today’s RISC-V solutions target specific applications, the R9A02G021 group MCUs have been designed to serve multiple end markets, such as IoT sensors, consumer electronics, medical devices, small appliances and industrial systems.
Similar to existing general-purpose MCUs, designers will have access to a full-scale development environment for the R9A02G021, provided by Renesas and its extensive network of toolchain partners.
“From our RISC-V purpose built ASSPs to this new general-purpose MCU, our goal is to deliver commercially viable products that customers can take to mass production quickly, while demonstrating the benefits for the RISC-V architecture,” said Daryl Khoo, Vice President of Embedded Processing 1st Business Division at Renesas. “In addition, customers often face with complex design challenges and trade-offs such as performance, power consumption, memory, or a choice of CPU architecture. The new RISC-V MCU provides an additional degree of choice to customers who want to use products with the open architecture.”
Renesas is able to provide a rich offering of RISC-V application-specific products, including its 32-bit voice-control and motor-control ASSP devices and RZ/Five 64-bit general purpose microprocessors (MPUs), which were built on CPU cores developed by Andes Technology. The R9A02G021 group represents the first generation of general- purpose MCUs based on the internally developed RISC-V core by Renesas that will roll out over the next several years.
“Until now, the MCU, a key potential market for RISC-V has been lacking strong commercial designs from leading suppliers which make up around 85% of the MCU market,” said Tom Hackenberg, Principal Analyst, Computing & Software, More Moore Business Line at Yole Group. “With Renesas introducing full commercial availability of a RISC-V multimarket MCU to its diverse MCU portfolio, as well as much needed support from well recognised industry standard tools suppliers, the RISC-V market is poised to finally start accelerating growth. As other leading vendors follow Renesas’ example, RISC-V should approach 10% of the overall MCU market by the end of 2029 with significant growth potential beyond.”
The R9A02G021 RISC-V group offers clock speeds up to 48MHz, while consuming extremely low power in standby at 0.3µA. It provides 128KB of fast flash memory, 16KB of SRAM memory and 4KB of flash memory for data storage.
Designed to withstand harsh conditions, the MCUs can operate reliably at ambient temperatures ranging from -40 °C to 125 °C.
The MCUs come with standard serial communications interfaces, as well as digital-to-analogue converter (DAC) and analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) functions to facilitate high-speed and secure connections with sensors, displays and other external modules.
The wide 1.6V to 5.5V input voltage range enables low-voltage, low-current operation and allows noise immunity, making the R9A02G021 ideal for battery-powered devices.
