April 28, 2024 
Professional magazine and portal dedicated to electronics 
Renesas’ Arm® Cortex®-M85 processor-based devices offer ultra high performance, graphics capabilities and leading-edge security for building automation, smart home, consumer and medical applications
Renesas Electronics Corporation, a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, introduced the RA8D1 microcontroller (MCU) group. The RA8D1 group is the second in Renesas’ RA8 Series, the first MCUs based on the Arm® Cortex®-M85 processor. RA8D1 MCUs deliver breakthrough performance of over 6.39 CoreMark/MHz1 combined with ample memory, graphics and peripheral functions optimized to address diverse graphics display solutions, and Voice/Vision Multimodal AI requirements for a range of applications in building automation, home appliances, smart home, consumer, and medical market segments.
All RA8 Series MCUs take advantage of the high performance of the Arm Cortex-M85 processor and Arm’s Helium™ technology with a vector/SIMD instruction set extension that provides up to a 4X performance boost for digital signal processor (DSP) and machine learning (ML) implementations over the Cortex-M7 core. This added performance is ideal for graphics and neural network processing and can eliminate the need for a separate hardware accelerator in some applications. They also offer advanced security including Arm TrustZone® technology, Renesas Security IP (RSIP-E51A), Secure Boot with first stage bootloader in immutable storage, Octal SPI interface with Decryption-on-the-fly (DOTF), and Pointer Authentication and Branch Target Identification (PACBTI) security extension.
Feature Set Optimized for Graphics Display Solutions and Vision/Voice AI
The new RA8D1 devices include a high-resolution graphics LCD controller with parallel RGB and MIPI-DSI interfaces to LCD display panels, a 2D graphics drawing engine, a 16-bit camera interface (CEU), multiple external memory interfaces for storage of frame buffer and graphics assets, and 176 and 224 pin packages. This feature set is combined with professional quality graphics user interface software solutions from SEGGER emWin and Microsoft GUIX fully integrated into the Renesas Flexible Software Package (FSP). Renesas also provides support for open-source Light and Versatile Graphics Library (LVGL) and a robust network of graphics and AI ecosystem partners. A full-featured graphics evaluation kit with LCD panel and camera module rounds out the solution and provides a robust development platform for graphics applications including industrial HMI, video doorbells, patient monitors, graphics calculators, security panels, printer display panels, and appliance displays.
Key Features of the RA8D1 Group MCUs
The new RA8D1 Group 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 security stacks 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.
Winning Combinations
Renesas has combined the new RA8D1 Group MCUs with numerous compatible devices from its portfolio to offer a wide array of Winning Combinations, including an Off-road GPS Guidance System and High-efficiency 7KW+ Smart Heat Pump. These Winning Combinations are technically vetted system architectures from mutually compatible devices that work together seamlessly to bring an optimized, low-risk design for faster time to market. Renesas offers more than 400 Winning Combinations with a wide range of products from the Renesas portfolio to enable customers to speed up the design process and bring their products to market more quickly. They can be found at renesas.com/win.
