Extending the company's extensive 32-bit ranges, these MCUs deliver a combination of enhanced performance, security, connectivity, peripheral IP, and an easy-to-use Flexible Software Package (FSP) to address the needs of next generation of embedded solutions.
To support the new family, Renesas 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. Designing with RA MCUs engineers will be able to develop Internet of Things (IoT) endpoint and edge devices for industrial and building automation, metering, healthcare, and home appliance applications more quickly, according to the company.
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.
The first five RA MCU Groups that are now available 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. The transition within the RA Family has been made easier thanks to feature and pin compatibility. Each RA MCU Group provides improved active and standby power, and enhanced features such as Renesas’ 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 roadmap offers PSA Certified and Trusted Firmware-M (TF-M) API compliant devices, including Cortex-M33 MCUs, low-power Cortex-M23 MCUs, and BLE / IEEE 802.15.4 wireless IoT products. MCUs with TF-M / PSA certification will give customers the confidence and assurance to quickly deploy secure IoT endpoint and edge devices, and smart factory equipment for Industry 4.0.
