Expanded lineup of cross-domain automotive control microcontrollers

Renesas Electronics Corporation has released a powerful new group of MCUs, the RH850/U2B MCUs, created to address the expanding demand to combine multiple applications into a single chip and realise a unified ECU for the evolving electrical-electronic architecture. Producing a combination of high-performance, freedom from interference, flexibility, and security, the cross-domain MCUs are developed for the rigorous workloads demanded by vehicle motion in terms of hybrid ICE and xEV traction inverter, connected gateway, high-end zone control, and domain control applications.

With this, the company expands its cross-domain MCU portfolio with devices that extend from RH850/U2A MCUs for body and chassis control systems up to high-performance RH850/U2B MCUs. Customers are also able to combine these MCUs with its R-Car S4 SoC devices for automotive central gateway systems to construct a scalable solution for E/E architectures.

“The future of automotive systems design lies in a vehicle-centralised, zone-oriented E/E architecture, which elevates the need for automotive chips that address the challenges these innovative architectures create for future vehicle generations,” Naoki Yoshida, vice president, Automotive Digital Products Marketing Division at Renesas. “The RH850/U2B MCUs expand Renesas’ cross-domain MCU family to offer customers higher levels of performance, memory integration, and hardware-based support for new zone- and domain-control applications, particularly for powertrain and HEV/EV, while maintaining the stringent cost, safety, and security parameters required for these automotive systems.”

Created for zone and domain applications, the 28nm MCUs develop on key functions from the’ RH850/E2x Series for powertrain and RH850/C1M-Ax Series for HEV/EV motor control, while attaching several new enhancements incorporating new accelerator IP, higher performance levels, and increased security. This combination allows users to combine multiple ECU functions into a single ECU while adhering to rigorous automotive-grade safety, security, and real-time operation demands.

The MCU’s integrated hypervisor hardware-based virtualisation assist function provides multiple software systems with up to ISO26262 ASIL D functional safety levels to function independently, with no interference, through high performance. It lessens the virtualisation overhead to maintain real-time execution. QoS offers a latency monitor and regulation function for all bus masters to assure minimum bandwidth is constantly available. The MCUs support safe and rapid full no-wait OTA software updates with dual-bank embedded flash that enables the ECU to update and save images while the MCUs are in active mode and allows the ECU to run from the original code if a failure occurs. Integrated motor control accelerator IP (EMU3S) works together with multiple dedicated motor control timer structures such as GTM v4.1 and TSG3 to dramatically decrease CPU processing loads while delivering high-speed rotation. Dedicated DFP accelerator IP allows the CPU to offload compute-heavy operations for complex control.