Renesas Electronics Corporation released the RX72M Group of RX microcontrollers (MCUs) featuring an EtherCAT slave controller for industrial Ethernet communication. The new MCUs offer a high-performance, single-chip MCU solution with large memory capacities for industrial equipment requiring control and communication functions such as compact industrial robots, remote I/O, programmable logic controllers, and industrial gateways. The new MCUs complete the need of EtherCAT which is growing fast in industrial Ethernet.
The RX72M microcontrollers attain the superior performance of a 1396 CoreMark score at 240MHz as measured by EEMBC Benchmarks and is ideal for both application processing as well as EtherCAT communication. Industrial application developers can reduce their bill of materials (BOM) and support the miniaturization levels required for industrial equipment design by combining a motor-control MCU with on-chip EtherCAT slave functions. The RX72M comes with 4MB of flash memory and large-capacity 1MB of SRAM which is highest SRAM capacity of RX MCU group.
The large-capacity SRAM helps the MCUs 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. The large-capacity SRAM also gives flexibility for the support of future functional expansions, such as OPC United Architecture (OPC UA) with no additional memory required. The on-board flash memory operates as two 2 MB banks enabling 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.
Key Features of the RX72M MCUs
- EtherCAT slave controller for industrial Ethernet communication in an RX MCU
- High performance with a CoreMark benchmark score of 1396 at up to 240 MHz, and embedded double precision floating point unit (FPU) in an RX MCU
- High-speed flash memory system supporting readout up to 120 MHz
- Dedicated trigonometric function (sin, cos, arctan and hypot functions) accelerators and register bank save function supporting high-precision motor control implementation – a feature shared with the Renesas RX72T motor-control MCUs
- Reliable cryptography functions such as encryption module and memory protection function in hardware to protect encryption keys – this prevents application systems from being copied without authorization and supports authentication for genuine equipment
- Flexible package options including 176-pin LQFP and 176-pin BGA configurations as well as the first 224-pin BGA package for RX MCUs, which offers additional space saving for size-constrained designs
The samples of RX72M Group of MCUs are available from Renesas and mass production orders will start from September 2019.
