Renesas Brings the High Performance of Arm Cortex-M85 Processor to Cost-Sensitive Applications with New RA8 Entry-Line MCU Groups

Renesas Electronics Corporation introduced the RA8E1 and RA8E2 microcontroller (MCU) groups, extending the industry’s most powerful series of MCUs. Introduced in 2023, the RA8 Series MCUs are the first to implement the Arm® Cortex®-M85 processor, enabling them to deliver market-leading 6.39 CoreMark/MHz performance. The new RA8E1 and RA8E2 MCUs offer the same performance but with a streamlined feature set that reduces costs, making them excellent candidates for high-volume applications such as industrial and home automation, office equipment, healthcare, and consumer products.

The RA8E1 and RA8E2 MCUs deploy Arm Helium™ technology, Arm’s M-Profile Vector Extension that provides up to a 4X performance boost for digital signal processor (DSP) and machine learning (ML) implementations versus MCUs based on the Arm Cortex-M7 processor. This performance uplift enables applications in the fast-growing field of 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, even while providing industry-leading performance. 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 and meet regulatory requirements. The new Arm Cortex-M85 core also performs various DSP/ML tasks at much lower power (more info).