Renesas Expands 28nm Cross-Domain Automotive MCU Product Lineup with New Microcontrollers

According to foreign media reports, Renesas Electronics Corporation, a major supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, announced a group of powerful new microcontrollers (MCUs): RH850/U2B MCU, designed to meet the growing demand for integrating multiple applications into a single chip, while realizing a unified electronic control unit (ECU) for the evolving electrical and electronic (E/E). The cross-domain RH850/U2B MCU combines high performance, flexibility, anti-interference and security, and is designed to meet the demanding workloads required for vehicle motion, suitable for applications such as hybrid ICE and xEV traction inverters, high-end regional control, Internet gateways and domain control.

(Image source: Renesas)

With this, Renesas Electronics has expanded its cross-domain MCU product lineup to include the RH850/U2A MCU for body and chassis control systems, as well as the high-performance RH850/U2B MCU. Customers can also combine these MCUs with Renesas Electronics' R-Car S4 SoC for automotive central gateway systems to build scalable solutions for E/E architectures.

“The future of automotive system design lies in vehicle-centric, domain-oriented E/E architectures, driving the need for automotive chips that can meet the challenges these innovative architectures bring to next-generation vehicles,” said Naoki Yoshida, Vice President of Automotive Digital Product Marketing Division at Renesas. “The RH850/U2B MCU expands Renesas’ cross-domain MCU portfolio, providing customers with higher levels of performance, memory integration, and hardware-based support for new domain control applications, especially powertrain and HEV/EV, while meeting the stringent cost, security, and encryption requirements required for automotive systems.”

The 28nm RH850/U2B MCU is designed for zone and domain applications. It builds on the key features of the Renesas RH850/E2 series for powertrain and the RH850/C1M-Ax series for HEV/EV motor control, and adds several new enhancements, such as new accelerator IP, higher performance levels, and higher security. This combination of improvements enables users to integrate multiple ECU functions into a single ECU while meeting stringent automotive-grade security, encryption, and real-time operation requirements.

(Image source: Renesas)

With hardware-based virtualization assistance, the MCU's integrated hypervisor allows multiple software systems that meet ISO26262 ASIL D functional safety levels to run independently during high performance without interference, and reduces the time required for virtualization to maintain real-time execution. Quality of Service (QoS) provides latency monitoring and adjustment functions for all bus masters to ensure that minimum bandwidth is always available. The RH850/U2B MCU supports safe and fast zero-wait OTA software updates with dual banks of embedded flash memory, allowing ECUs to update and save images while the MCU is in active mode and enable the ECU to run from the original code in the event of a fault. The integrated motor control accelerator IP (EMU3S) works in conjunction with multiple dedicated motor control timer structures such as GTM v4.1 and TSG3 to significantly reduce the CPU processing load while achieving high-speed rotation. The dedicated data flow processor (DFP) accelerator IP enables the CPU to offload heavy computing operations for complex control.

Additional features of the RH850/U2B MCU

• Up to eight 400MHz performance cores, four of which use lockstep architecture, to deliver top performance in an automotive-grade MCU with built-in flash for ASIL-D and ASIL-B applications;

  
  

• Support for Evita Full standard integrated security features, including elliptic curve cryptography for enhanced protection against cyberattacks;

  
  

• New high-performance motor control accelerator IP (EMU3S) that can be flexibly used with multiple dedicated motor control timer structures such as GTM v4.1 and TSG3;

  
  

• Dedicated resolver/digital converter accelerator IP (RDC3X) that processes analog signals from motor rotation angle sensors (resolvers) or inductive position sensors;

  
  

• DR1000C: A RISC-V based parallel coprocessor IP;

  
  

• With vector extension (DFP), authorized by NSITEXE, it supports fast execution of complex mathematical algorithms;

  
  

• State-of-the-art communication interfaces including Gigabit Ethernet TSN with switch support; multiple AES128 lockstep module instances for collision-free, deterministic security and secure communications.