Renesas Electronics introduces RX Series 32-bit Microcontrollers (MCUS)

     Renesas Electronics Corporation announced the launch of the RX71M, the latest flagship of the RX series of 32-bit microcontrollers (MCUS). Developed specifically for industrial applications, the new family of products will increase the CPU operating frequency from the previous product's 120MHz to 240 MHz, and the on-chip Flash memory (Flash) capacity can reach up to 4MB.

     With the increasing complexity and scale of systems, manufacturers are rushing to adopt platform-based products to solve the problem of longer development times and higher costs. On-chip flash MCUS are widely used in mid-sized industrial devices at mid-price points to achieve the perfect balance between performance and system cost. M2M communication in industrial equipment requires MCUS that are specifically optimized for each performance level, from sensor nodes operating at 30 MHz to controllers operating at 200 MHz and beyond, as well as MCU scalability to reduce software and hardware development man-hours.

     More recently, industrial customers are increasingly diversifying their system development efforts across multiple enterprises, working with multiple partners who have an advantage in a particular technology. This will not only reduce the cost of developing new and advanced features needed to transition to the Internet of Things era, but also improve efficiency and reduce development time. This decentralized and joint development approach may introduce risks to the customer's own core technology, such as important algorithms, such as disclosure or unauthorized copying. Therefore, the development method adopted must ensure the security of its own software resources.

     Since a series of processing processes from data input, arithmetic processing to result output must be completed sequentially in a set time, industrial equipment requires real-time performance. If the MCU CPU is operating faster than the flash memory can be accessed, dedicated high-speed on-chip SRAM can be added so that algorithms requiring real-time processing can be run through the high-speed SRAM, but the additional use of dedicated SRAM for on-chip flash can increase the cost. In addition, if the on-chip storage capacity of the previous flash microcontroller is not large enough, expensive high-speed SRAM or flash memory must be added externally, which also increases the BOM cost and takes up a larger PCB board area.