Renesas has introduced the RA8T1 microcontroller (MCU) group based on the Arm® Cortex®-M85 processor. RA8T1 devices address real-time control of motors, power supplies and other products commonly used in industrial and building automation, as well as smart homes.
The RA8T1 group is the third in Renesas’ RA8 Series, all of which deliver breakthrough performance of 6.39 CoreMark/MHz1. All RA8 MCUs take advantage of the high performance of the Arm Cortex-M85 processor and Arm’s Helium technology that provides up to a 4X performance boost for digital signal processor (DSP) and machine learning (ML) implementations over the Cortex-M7 core. This added performance in RA8T1 devices can be used for AI functions that can predict maintenance requirements for motors, reducing costly downtime.
The new RA8T1 devices include advanced PWM timing features such as 3-phase complementary output, 0% and 100% duty output capability, a double-buffer compare match register, and five phase counting modes. Analog capabilities of the new MCUs include 12-bit ADCs, 12-bit DACs and high-speed comparators used in voltage and current measurement and over-current protection. RA8T1 MCUs also offer multiple communications functions, including SCI, SPI, I2C/I3C, CAN/CAN-FD, Ethernet, and USB-FS. The new group also provides port output shutdown capability when an anomaly is detected, an important safety feature in motor control. These capabilities combined with the advanced timers and Renesas’ power management expertise, enable customers to build comprehensive, low-power motor control solutions.
All RA8 devices also offer advanced security including Arm TrustZone® technology, Renesas Security IP (RSIP-E51A), Secure Boot with first stage bootloader in immutable storage, and Pointer Authentication and Branch Target Identification (PACBTI) security extension.
The new RA8T1 Group MCUs are supported by Renesas’ Flexible Software Package (FSP). The FSP enables faster application development by providing all the infrastructure software needed, including multiple RTOS, BSP, peripheral drivers, middleware, connectivity, networking, and security stacks as well as reference software to build complex AI, motor control and cloud solutions. It allows customers to integrate their own legacy code and choice of RTOS with FSP, thus providing full flexibility in application development. Using the FSP will ease migration of existing designs to the new RA8 Series devices.
The RA8T1 Group MCUs are available now, along with the FSP software. The new MCUs are supported in Renesas’ Flexible Motor Control development kit that enables easy evaluation of motor control using permanent magnet synchronous motors (brushless DC motors), and the Renesas Motor Workbench development tool. This development kit offers a common design platform with numerous Renesas motor control MCUs from the RA and RX families, enabling migration of IP across numerous devices.
