Renesas puts Cortex M85 into RA8 series MCUs

Renesas has put Arm’s Cortex M85 into its RA8 family of MCUs which gives the RA8E1 and RA8E2  devices 6.39 CoreMark/MHz performance.

The RA8E1 and RA8E2 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 enables applications in AIoT where high performance is crucial to execute AI models.

RA8 Series devices integrate low power features and multiple low power modes to improve power efficiency,

A combination of low power modes, independent power domains, lower voltage range, fast wakeup time and low typical active and standby currents enables lower overall system power and allows customers to lower overall system power consumption, meet regulatory requirements and use lower power for various DSP/ML tasks.

RA8 Series MCUs are supported by Renesas’ Flexible Software Package (FSP). The FSP enables faster application development by providing all the infrastructure software needed, including multiple RTOS, BSP, peripheral drivers, middleware, connectivity, networking, and TrustZone support as well as reference software to build complex AI, motor control and cloud solutions.

It allows customers to integrate their own legacy code and choice of RTOS with FSP, thus providing full flexibility in application development. Using the FSP will ease migration of existing designs to the new RA8 Series devices.

E1 has:

Core: 360MHz M85

Memory: 1MB Flash, 544 KB SRAM (including 32KB TCM w/ ECC, 512KB user SRAM with parity protection), 1KB standby SRAM, 32KB I/D caches

Peripherals: Ethernet, XSPI (Octal SPI), SPI, I2C, USBFS, CAN-FD, SSI, ADC 12bit, DAC 12bit, HSCOMP, temperature sensor, 8-bit CEU, GPT, LP-GPT, WDT, RTC

Packages:100/144 LQK

E2 has:

Core: 480MHz M85

Memory: 1MB Flash, 672 KB SRAM (including 32KB TCM w/ ECC, 512KB user SRAM with parity protection+128 KB additional user SRAM), 1KB standby SRAM, 32KB I/D caches

Peripherals:16-bit external memory I/F, XSPI (Octal SPI), SPI, I2C, USBFS, CAN-FD, SSI, ADC 12bit, DAC 12bit, HSCOMP, temperature sensor, GLCDC,2DRW, GPT, LP-GPT, WDT, RTC

Packages: BGA 224

Renesas will offer an RA8E2 Evaluation Kit including a TFT Display in early Q1 2025.

More at: renesas.com/RA8E1 and renesas.com/RA8E2.