Industrial MPU provides fast and accurate real-time control with EtherCAT communication

Renesas Electronics Corporation offers a new industrial MPU that supports the EtherCAT communication protocol, attaining high-speed, accurate real-time control for industrial systems. The RZ/T2L MPU inherits the hardware architecture of its higher-end product, the RZ/T2M, and delivers optimised solutions for the fast-growing EtherCAT communication market. The new MPU provides high-speed and accurate real-time processing performance needed for AC servo drives, industrial robots, inverters, collaborative robots and others while decreasing the chip size by up to 50% compared to the RZ/T2M. The new device is excellent for FA and a wide range of applications, including medical equipment and building automation, where EtherCAT is increasingly being adopted.

"Accurate real-time control is essential to improving productivity and product quality in industrial systems," said Hitoshi Shirakabe, vice president of Renesas' Industrial Automation Business Division. "Our RZ/T2L can make this a reality, and with its support for the rapidly expanding EtherCAT market, it will elevate the performance to the next level and accelerate the automation of factories and buildings, as well as medical devices."

"For decades, we are committed to providing engineers with the best-in-class development tools for the latest Renesas MCUs and MPUs to enable their embedded innovations of tomorrow," said Norbert Weiss, managing director of Lauterbach GmbH, leading supplier of debug and trace tools. "Thanks to our great partnership with Renesas, industrial customers of the RZ/T2L MPU will also get highly reliable tools and excellent support from the beginning."

The device has an Arm Cortex-R52 CPU with a maximum operating frequency of 800MHz and a proven EtherCAT slave controller developed by Beckhoff Automation for Ethernet communication. All internal RAM of the RZ/T2L is equipped with the ECC function as needed by industrial applications. Additionally, the large (576KB) memory directly connected to the CPU decreases unpredictability in execution time caused by cache memory and allows reliable, deterministic processing. It also provides peripheral functions, including multi-protocol encoder interfaces for angle sensors, Sigma-Delta interfaces, and A/D converters. These are arranged on a dedicated LLPP bus directly connected to the CPU to perform fast and accurate real-time control capabilities.

The device utilises the same architecture, including the CPU, peripheral functions, and internal bus, as the company's most high-end motor control MPU, RZ/T2M, to realise the same performance level. Also, it offers the Flexible Software Package (FSP) and software development environment that is compatible with other RZ Family MPUs and RA Family MCUs, enabling engineers to preserve their software assets. This decreases development efforts and costs and facilitates the scalable development of various products.

The device may be used as a functional safety MPU to satisfy the increasing processing requirements to realise functional safety in industrial equipment. The company will offer self-diagnostic software and SIL3 system software kits in Q4/2023, allowing customers to reduce development efforts and costs to develop a functional safety system. Also, it supports different security functions, including secure boot, secure firmware update, JTAG authentication, unique ID, and cryptographic accelerator to lower the risk of data breach and tampering of user programs. The company will supply the security software package as part of a security solution in May 2023.