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Renesas Electronics Corporation, a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, has expanded its RA4 Series microcontrollers (MCUs) with the addition of the 32-bit RA4M3 Group of MCUs. The RA4M3 MCUs boost operating performance up to 100 MHz using the Arm® Cortex®-M33 core based on Armv8-M architecture. Featuring industry-leading performance, Arm TrustZone® technology, Renesas’ Secure Crypto Engine, and a suite of new memory enhancements, the RA4M3 Group makes it easy to develop safe and secure IoT edge devices for low-power applications, such as security, metering, industrial, and HVAC applications. The RA4M3 Group offers a well-balanced combination of performance and power consumption with advanced security and safety, in addition the RA4M3 Group MCUs feature flexible memory expansion options that are to suit a broad range of industrial and IoT applications that require continuous innovation.

The RA4M3 Group of MCUs has been designed for low-power IoT applications that require a balance of high performance, strong security, and higher memory. The RA4M3 MCUs combine TrustZone technology with Renesas’ enhanced Secure Crypto Engine, enabling customers to realize secure element functionality in a wide variety of IoT designs. The Secure Crypto Engine incorporates multiple symmetric and asymmetric cryptography accelerators, advanced key management, security lifecycle management, power analysis resistance, and tamper detection.

RA4M3 Group Block Diagram

The RA4M3 MCUs drive power consumption down to 119uA/MHz in active mode running CoreMark from flash memory and 1.6mA in standby mode with standby wakeup times as fast as 30 µs – a critical element for IoT applications operating in the field for extended periods. For memory-intense applications, designers can combine Quad-SPI and SD-card interfaces with the MCUs’ built-in embedded memory to increase capacity. The background operation and Flash Bank SWAP option is ideal for memory optimized firmware updates running in the background. The increased embedded RAM with parity/ECC also makes the RA4M3 MCUs ideal for safety-critical applications. The RA4M3 MCUs also feature several integrated features to lower BOM costs, including capacitive touch sensing, embedded flash memory densities up to 1 MB, and analog, communications, and memory peripherals.

Click below for a brief RA4M3 Group MCU overview

Design Tools

To support designers Renesas have also released the EK-RA4M3 - RA4M3 MCU Group evaluation board which enables users to effortlessly evaluate the features of the RA4M3 MCU Group and develop embedded systems applications using Renesas' Flexible Software Package (FSP) and e2 studio IDE, this can help speed up time to market considerably. The kit allows utilisation of the rich on-board features along with the designers choice of popular ecosystem add-ons to bring big ideas to life.

Together, the RA4M3 Group with Renesas’ Flexible Software Package (FSP) allows customers to re-use their legacy code and combine it with software from partners across the vast Arm ecosystem and the RA partner ecosystem to speed implementation of complex connectivity and security functions. The FSP includes FreeRTOS and middleware, offering a premium device-to-cloud option for developers. These out-of-box options can be easily replaced and expanded with any other RTOS or middleware.

FSP Overview

The FSP provides a host of efficiency enhancing tools for developing projects targeting the RA4M3 MCUs. The e2 studio Integrated Development Environment provides a familiar development cockpit from which the key steps of project creation, module selection and configuration, code development, code generation, and debugging are all managed. The FSP uses a GUI to simplify the process and dramatically accelerate the development process.

Anglia are offering customers a FREE evaluation board and samples of the RA4M3 Group of MCUs from Renesas, please fill in the form below to register your interest now.