Renesas Electronics offers the RX72M group of RX microcontrollers featuring an EtherCAT slave controller for industrial Ethernet communication. The single-chip microcontroller has large memory capacities for compact industrial robots, programmable logic controllers, remote I/O, and industrial gateways that require control and communication functions such as compact industrial robots, programmable logic controllers, remote I/O, and industrial gateways.
The RX72M group achieves a 1396 CoreMark score at 240MHz as measured by EEMBC benchmarks and it is capable of application processing and EtherCAT communication. It combines a motor-control microcontroller with on-chip EtherCAT slave functions to reduce the circuit board area by approximately 50 per cent, compared with earlier devices and support miniaturisation in industrial equipment design.
The RX72M is the first RX MCU group to include an EtherCAT slave controller featuring the RX family’s highest SRAM capacity of 1Mbyte of SRAM and 4Mbyte of flash memory. It is also the first embedded double precision floating point unit (FPU) in an RX microcontroller.
The large-capacity SRAM allows the microcontrollers to run multiple memory-intensive middleware systems, such as TCP/IP, web servers, and file systems, at high speed without the use of external memory. It also supports future functional expansions, such as OPC United Architecture with no additional memory required. The on-board flash memory operates as two 2Mbyte banks, which enables stable operation of the end equipment, such as executing a program in one flash memory while simultaneously conducting background rewrites in the other flash memory.
Dedicated trigonometric function (sin, cos, arctan and hypot fucntions) accelerators and a register bank save function support precision motor control implementation. Encryption module and memory protection function in hardware to protect application systems from being copied without authorisation and support authentication.
Package options include 176-pin LQFP and 176-pin BGA configurations as well as the first 224-pin BGA package for RX microcontrollers for size-constrained designs.
Samples of the RX72M Group of MCUs are available now. Renesas will begin mass production orders starting September 2019.
