Next generation automotive controller microcontroller from Renesas

1 min read

Renesas Electronics has announced the sample shipment of the industry's first on-chip flash memory microcontroller (MCU) that uses a 28nm process technology.

The RH850/E2x Series MCU incorporates up to six 400MHz CPU cores, making it the first on-chip flash memory automotive MCU to achieve the industry's highest processing performance of 9600 MIPS. The series also features a built-in flash memory of up to 16MB as well as enhanced security functions and functional safety.

Renesas is describing the 28nm-generation automotive control MCU as a breakthrough product featuring next-generation technology that's intended to support complex automotive control. OEMs and Tier 1 manufacturers in the automotive space have started to adopt the new 28nm MCU,

According to the company as the automotive industry looks to develop environmentally-friendly vehicles, next-generation fuel-efficient engines will require much higher processing performance in order to allow the implementation of new fuel combustion systems. High processing performance and high integration densities will be required to achieve miniaturisation and higher efficiency in the motors and inverters used in electric vehicles (EV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV).

Looking to address these requirements, and when compared to the earlier 40nm MCUs, the RH850/E2x Series of MCUs are able to achieve approximately three times the performance at the same power level. The RH850/E2x also includes enhanced sensor interfaces which are necessary for precise automotive control functions.

The RH850/E2x Series is also equipped with up to 16MB of flash ROM and it is possible to only update certain arbitrary areas during program operation. The RH850/E2x Series comes with improved serial interfaces, including up to ten channels of CAN FD and one Ethernet channel. Security functions that support Evita Medium enable the MCUs to support safe and rapid OTA updating of the software.

Targeting ASIL-D, the highest level of the ISO 26262 functional safety standard for automotive E/E systems, the RH850/E2x Series has adopted the dual core lock step CPU structure that is able to guarantee that the calculations performed by two CPU cores are identical. The RH850/E2x also provides up to four sets of CPU pairs, and features a variety of hardware functional safety improvements.

In applications where a system malfunction could lead to life-endangering accidents, these features immediately detect faults should a malfunction occur and allow system safety to be maintained.

Renesas will provide safety analysis tools that can flexibly support a wide range of use cases to implement safe systems.

To assure scalability in the RH850/E2x Series, in addition to the 28nm flash memory MCU, Renesas has also launched a 40nm process MCU.