Highlights of Technical Product Training from Renesas in Germany

On November 12-14^th 2019, Renesas Technical Training with the aim of teaching the company’s latest product offerings took place in the picturesque town of Grassau in Germany. The training lasted two days with sessions ranging from marketing updates, technical lectures as well as hands-on lab exercises. DesignSpark has participated in the training and is about to share the event highlights with our readers in this article.

Renesas Electronics is a Japanese semiconductor manufacturing company with representation in over 20 countries worldwide. Renesas is the top player in the microcontroller/microprocessor market, but the company’s product range also includes analog, power and SoC devices.

Capture_21_5a960d147c32bd0eb202ca5e45155bcd22bbb024.png _{Microcontroller/microprocessors from Renesas (https://www.renesas.com/eu/en/products/microcontrollers-microprocessors.html)}

A number of sessions around Renesas’ microcontroller and microprocessor product line-up were conducted during the training. Starting from low power general purpose RL78 microcontrollers to high-performance RZ/G2 family of microprocessors, Renesas truly offers something for everyone. However, the highlight of the training, no doubt, was a new family of microcontrollers – Renesas Advanced (RA) 32-bit microcontrollers with Arm Cortex-M core architecture and high performance of up to 200 MHz. There are four pin-compatible series of RA MCUs: RA2, RA4, RA6, and RA8.

_{RA family product line-up (https://www.renesas.com/eu/en/products/microcontrollers-microprocessors/ra.html#overview)}

With an expected number of 75 billion connected devices, end-to-end security in the IoT environment is becoming extremely challenging. Since the notion of networking devices is relatively new, there is a general tendency to ignore security measures in the initial stages of product design. However, during his presentation, Mohammed Dogar, Senior Director of Business Development at Renesas, pointed out, “Security needs to be designed in from the beginning. It cannot be sprinkled in later.” With this mindset, Renesas RA MCUs are designed with security features incorporated into the hardware level. The first generation of RA family offers Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption, meanwhile, RA4 and RA6 devices are secured using fully integrated Secure Crypto Engine (SCE) 5 and 7, respectively.

RA MCU Evaluation Kits for each series as well as the version with Graphics Expansion Board are offered by RS Components. The kits can be programmed and debugged using the Renesas e2studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

RS Stock No	Product	Features
(192-7184)	EK-RA2A1	R7FA2A1AB3CFM MCU,48MHz, Arm Cortex-M23 core, 256KB Flash, 32KB SRAM, 64 pins
(192-7185)	EK-RA4A1	R7FA4M1AB3CFP MCU, 48MHz, Arm Cortex-M4 core, 256KB Flash, 32KB SRAM, 100 pins
(192-7186)	EK-RA6M1	R7FA6M1AD3CFP MCU, 120MHz, Arm Cortex-M4 core, 512KB Flash, 256KB SRAM, 100 pins
(192-7187)	EK-RA6M2	R7FA6M2AF3CFB MCU,120MHz, Arm Cortex-M4 core, 1MB Flash, 384KB SRAM, 144 pins
(192-7188)	EK-RA6M3	R7FA6M3AH3CFC MCU,120MHz, Arm Cortex-M4 core, 2MB Flash, 640KB SRAM, 176 pins
(192-7189)	EK-RA6M3G	R7FA6M3AH3CFC MCU, 4.3"480/272px color TFT LCD with capactive touch,120MHz, Arm Cortex-M4 core, 2MB Flash, 640KB SRAM, 176 pins

During the training, DesignSpark met up with Andreas Bier from Renesas, who agreed to share more about the RA family, including key values and features of each series. You can find his presentation in the video below.

Other topics that were covered during the training included Energy Harvesting solutions based on SOTB technology and RE microcontrollers, industrial signal conditioning and power solutions, clocking and timing reference designs and next-generation inductive position sensing. For more information, please refer to the Renesas website.