Renesas Electronics has announced that it will be demonstrating an Arm Cortex-M85 core-based microcontroller (MCU) live at Embedded World 2022 in Nuremberg in June.
Renesas introduced the Arm Cortex-M based RA (Renesas Advanced) series of MCUs in October 2019, entering the general-purpose Arm-Cortex-M market with a powerful and feature-rich flash-based MCU family. In about 30 months, Renesas quickly took the lead, launching 17 MCU families with more than 200 products. In addition, Renesas has developed a strong partner ecosystem to provide customers with comprehensive solutions for IoT, artificial intelligence/machine learning, industrial automation, medical, building automation, home appliances, and many other applications.
"As a key Arm partner, we are proud to be the first to demonstrate a high-performance Cortex-M85 processor-based MCU, a clear example of the momentum we are building in the Arm ecosystem." Renesas IoT and Infrastructure Roger Wendelken, Senior Vice President of the Business Unit, said, "The RA series has been a tremendous success in a short period of time, demonstrating the core strengths of Renesas' MCUs, including design expertise, quality, and interaction with customers and customers in all markets and regions. Close cooperation with partners.”
Dipti Vachani, senior vice president and general manager of Arm's Automotive and IoT business lines, said: "To continue to scale and evolve, next-generation IoT solutions require ever-increasing levels of performance, security and simplified development, and we are delivering on our new Arm Cortex-M85 achieves this. Demonstration of the first chip based on our most secure and highest performance Cortex-M processor will showcase the new and exciting applications it will support and further cement our partnership with continued close collaboration with Renesas Electronics.”
The Arm Cortex-M85 processor features Helium technology, Arm's M-Profile vector extension, which enables advanced DSP/ML capabilities and helps accelerate compute-intensive applications such as edge node AI. The Cortex-M85 delivers over 6 CoreMark/MHz performance to support demanding IoT use cases requiring maximum compute performance and DSP or ML capabilities, implemented on a single, easily programmable Cortex-M processor. Cortex-M features such as deterministic operation, short interrupt response times and state-of-the-art low-power support are also uncompromised on the Cortex-M85.
Renesas Electronics is developing a new series of RA MCUs based on the Cortex-M85 processor, scheduled for release in 2023. These new RA series MCUs will provide breakthrough performance and fully deterministic, low-latency, real-time operation to meet the demands of demanding applications in numerous markets. The new RA family of products will bridge the gap between MCUs and MPUs, enabling complex compute-intensive applications with lower power consumption and the ease of use of MCUs. This will help customers protect their investment in software development and reduce the cost of migrating to MPU-based systems. Like other RA MCUs, the new devices will offer best-in-class peripherals, memory and low power consumption.
The new Cortex-M85 core based on the Armv8-M architecture supports Arm TrustZone technology for securing secure assets. Combined with TrustZone, Renesas' integrated cryptographic engine, immutable storage, key management, and tamper-resistant protection against DPA/SPA side-channel attacks will provide a comprehensive and fully integrated secure element functionality. The Armv8-M architecture also brings the Pointer Authentication/Branch Target Identification (PAC/BTI) security extension, a new capability that enhances defenses against software attacks and facilitates PSA Certified Level 2 certification .
Renesas' Flexible Software Package (FSP) will support the new RA MCUs based on the Cortex-M85 core. FSP by providing all the infrastructure software required (including multiple RTOS, BSP, peripheral drivers, middleware, connectivity, networking and security stacks and reference software for building complex AI, motor control and graphics solutions) for faster application development. It allows customers to integrate their own legacy code and RTOS of choice with the FSP, providing full flexibility for application development. Using FSP will simplify the migration of existing designs to new RA products.
