Bringing high performance of Arm processor to cost-sensitive applications

Renesas Electronics Corporation has introduced the RA8E1 and RA8E2 MCU groups, extending the industry's most powerful series of MCUs. Introduced in 2023, the RA8 Series MCUs are the first to implement the Arm Cortex-M85 processor, allowing them to deliver market-leading 6.39 Coremark/MHz1 performance. The new MCUs deliver the same performance but with a streamlined feature set that lowers costs, making them outstanding candidates for high-volume applications such as industrial and home automation, office equipment, healthcare, and consumer products.

The MCUs deploy Arm Helium technology, Arm's M-Profile Vector Extension, that provides up to a 4X performance boost for DSP and ML implementations versus MCUs based on the Arm Cortex-M7 processor. This performance uplift allows applications in the fast-growing field of AIoT, where high performance is vital for executing AI models.

RA8 Series devices integrate low-power features and multiple low-power modes to improve power efficiency while delivering industry-leading performance. A combination of low power modes, independent power domains, lower voltage range, fast wakeup time, and low typical active and standby currents allows for lower overall system power. It enables customers to lower overall system power consumption and meet regulatory requirements. The new Arm Cortex-M85 core also performs various DSP/ML tasks at much lower power.

RA8 Series MCUs are supported by Renesas' Flexible Software Package (FSP). The FSP allows faster application development by providing all the infrastructure software needed, including multiple RTOS, BSP, peripheral drivers, middleware, connectivity, networking, TrustZone support, and reference software to build complex AI, motor control and cloud solutions. It allows customers to incorporate their own legacy code and choice of RTOS with FSP, therefore, providing full flexibility in application development. Using the FSP will ease the migration of existing designs to the new RA8 Series devices.

"Our customers love the superior performance of the RA8 MCUs and are now looking for more feature-optimised versions combined with high performance for their cost-sensitive industrial, vision AI and mid-end graphics applications," said Daryl Khoo, vice president of Embedded Processing 1st Business Division at Renesas. "The RA8E1 and RA8E2 deliver the right balance of performance and features for those markets and, with FSP, enable easy migration within the RA8 Series or from RA6 MCUs."