RISC-V MCUs Offer Developers a New Low-Power, High-Performance Option along with Full Toolchain Support
TOKYO, Japan ―
Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE:6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced the industry’s first general-purpose 32-bit RISC-V-based microcontrollers (MCUs) built with an internally developed CPU core. While many MCU providers have recently joined investment alliances to advance the development of RISC-V products, Renesas has already designed and tested a new RISC-V core independently, which is now implemented in a commercial product and available globally. The new, R9A02G021 group of MCUs provides embedded systems designers a clear path to developing a wide range of power-conscious, cost-sensitive applications based on the open-source instruction set architecture (ISA).
While most of today’s RISC-V solutions target specific applications, the R9A02G021 group MCUs are designed to serve multiple end markets, such as IoT sensors, consumer electronics, medical devices, small appliances and industrial systems. Similar to existing general-purpose MCUs, designers will have access to a full-scale development environment for the R9A02G021, provided by Renesas and its extensive network of toolchain partners. This will allow them to significantly reduce costs, engineering resources and development time.
“From our RISC-V purpose built ASSPs to this new general-purpose MCU, our goal is to deliver commercially viable products that customers can take to mass production quickly, while demonstrating the benefits for the RISC-V architecture,” said Daryl Khoo, Vice President of Embedded Processing 1st Business Division at Renesas. “In addition, customers often face with complex design challenges and tradeoffs such as performance, power consumption, memory, or a choice of CPU architecture. The new RISC-VMCU provides an additional degree of choice to customers who want to use products with the open architecture.”