RA8M1 Microcontrollers

Renesas' RA8 family with the RA8M1 group integrates the Arm Cortex-M85 core with excellent peripherals, memory, and leading-edge security with TrustZone®. The RA8M1 devices include several low-power features to reduce the overall system power while still providing high performance. These devices combine with advanced process technology to bring together the performance, quality, and reliability that Renesas has always been known for.

The RA8M1 MCU group expands the RA family SAM into the high-performance market. These MCUs lie in the crossover space between MCUs and MPUs and are suited for customer applications that require the higher performance of an MPU but the lower power consumption and ease of use of the MCU. The RA8M1 MCUs, with the Cortex-M85 core running at 480 MHz, integrated with large Flash/SRAM memory (2 MB/1 MB) and a rich set of peripherals, are optimally defined to support AI, motor control, PLC, metering, and other broad-based industrial and IoT applications. Multiple external interfaces, connectivity peripherals, and packages from 100 pins to 224 pins are included to serve the needs of a broad range of high-performance applications.

The Arm Cortex-M85 core, with the Arm v8.1m architecture and a 7-stage superscalar pipeline, is the highest-performance Cortex-M core and introduces Helium, the M-Profile Vector Extension (MVE) that significantly accelerates signal processing and machine learning capabilities, enabling an unprecedented four times the acceleration in ML tasks and three times the acceleration in DSP tasks versus the older Cortex-M7 core. Helium is a single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) extension to the instruction set, which can provide a performance uplift by processing more data per instruction. This is similar to Neon on the Arm Cortex-A processor cores but is more optimized for resource-constrained and lower power microcontrollers and is designed to Cortex-M principles: real-time, area efficient, and integrated with TrustZone. It adds 150 scalar and vector instructions and allows the processing of 128-bit registers. Used optimally, this can eliminate the need for an additional DSP core in the system. Helium brings intelligent processing to the edge, enabling local processing (less traffic to the cloud and lower costs) and lower overall system power, allowing small, low-power embedded systems to address compute needs in applications as diverse as audio processing, drone navigation and control, AR/VR applications, sensor hubs, and image processing.