Press release

Renesas Electronics Launches RX72M Group of Microcontrollers With EtherCAT® Support for Industrial Applications

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Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723), a premier supplier of
advanced semiconductor solutions, today introduced the RX72M Group of RX
microcontrollers (MCUs) featuring an EtherCAT® slave controller for
industrial Ethernet communication. The new flagship product group for
the Renesas RX family offers a high-performance, single-chip MCU
solution with large memory capacities for industrial equipment requiring
control and communication functions such as compact industrial robots,
programmable logic controllers, remote I/O, and industrial gateways.

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Renesas RX72M MCUs with EtherCAT support for industrial equipment (Photo: Business Wire)

Renesas RX72M MCUs with EtherCAT support for industrial equipment (Photo: Business Wire)

The use of EtherCAT in industrial Ethernet is growing fast, and is
currently used on dedicated MCUs, ICs, and high-end system-on-chip (SoC)
devices specialized for EtherCAT communication. The new RX72M Group
achieves the superior performance of a 1396 CoreMark® score (Note 1) at
240MHz as measured by EEMBC® Benchmarks, and it is capable of both
application processing and EtherCAT communication. Combining a
motor-control MCU with on-chip EtherCAT slave functions allows
industrial application developers reduce their bill of materials (BOM)
and support the miniaturization levels required for industrial equipment
design.

“The RX72M Group offers revolutionary solutions for circuit board
miniaturization, a key issue facing industrial robot designers as space
constraints for boards continue to tighten,” said Akira Denda, Vice
President, Industrial Automation Business Division, Renesas Electronics
Corporation. “Leveraging our extensive embedded design expertise as a
leading global MCU supplier and solution provider for industrial
networks, Renesas is pleased to introduce the RX72M devices, which allow
approximately 50 percent reduction in circuit board area compared with
earlier devices while maintaining high performance and EtherCAT support,
offering customers an easy and flexible path to industrial equipment
design.”

The RX72M Group is the first RX MCU group to include an EtherCAT slave
controller featuring the RX family’s highest SRAM capacity – 1 MB of
SRAM – and 4 MB of Flash memory. The large-capacity SRAM allows 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. It also provides flexibility for the support of future
functional expansions, such as OPC United Architecture (OPC UA, Note 2)
with no additional memory required. The on-board flash memory operates
as two 2 MB banks, which enables 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

  • The first 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 the first embedded double precision floating point unit (FPU)
    in an RX MCU
  • High-speed flash memory system supporting readout up to 120 MHz,
    creating high-performance and low-variability execution environment
  • 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

Availability

Samples of the RX72M Group of MCUs are available now. Renesas will begin
mass production orders starting September 2019. (Availability is subject
to change without notice.)

More Information

To learn more about the new Renesas RX72M MCUs, visit https://www.renesas.com/products/microcontrollers-microprocessors/rx/rx700/rx72m.html

To learn more about Renesas’ industrial network solutions, visit https://www.renesas.com/solutions/industrial-automation/industrial-network/industrial-ethernet-and-fieldbus.html

Notes

Note 1: CoreMark: A benchmark test designed specifically for evaluating
CPU core performance by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium
(EEMBC®) of the United States. This test consists of a set of programs
written in the C programming language that reads and writes data ,
integer operations and control calculations. The performance value per
unit clock frequency is based on the CC-RX V3 C/C++ compiler for the RX
family.

Note 2: OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is an industrial communication
data interchange standard.

About Renesas Electronics Corporation

Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE:
6723
) delivers trusted embedded design innovation with complete
semiconductor solutions that enable billions of connected, intelligent
devices to enhance the way people work and live. A global
leader in microcontrollers, analog, power, and SoC products, Renesas
provides comprehensive solutions for a broad range of automotive,
industrial, home electronics, office automation, and information
communication technology applications that help shape a limitless
future. Learn more at renesas.com.

(Remarks) EtherCAT is a registered trademark and patented technology,
licensed by Beckhoff Automation GmbH, Germany. Coremark is a registered
trademark of EEMBC. EEMBC is a registered trademark of the Embedded
Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium. All registered trademarks or
trademarks are the property of their respective owners.