Japanese electronics company Renesas has launched Arm Cortex-M33-based MCUs for IoT applications. They combine Arm TrustZone technology with Renesas-enhanced secure crypto engine, octa memory interface and innovations that enable secure designs.

The expansion of Renesas’ RA6 microcontrollers sees nine more RA6M4 group MCUs, increasing the RA family to 42 MCUs. These 32bit MCUs boost operating performance up to 200MHz using the Cortex-M33 core based on Arm v8-M architecture with TrustZonetechnology.

The MCUs deliver optimised performance with security and connectivity supported by a flexible software package (FSP). In addition, the Renesas partner ecosystem offers software and hardware building blocks that work out-of-the-box with RA6M4 MCUs and FSP to address Industrial 4.0, building automation, metering, healthcare and home appliance applications.

With strong security, connectivity, large embedded RAM with parity and ECC, low power consumption, and the Arm developer and tools ecosystem, the MCUs can speed the development of intelligent IoT edge and endpoint devices. The company’s enhanced secure crypto engine delivers security, incorporating multiple symmetric and asymmetric cryptography accelerators, key management, security lifecycle management, tamper detection, and increased resistance to side-channel attack, in addition to TrustZone technology.

These integrated security features make the MCUs suitable for connected applications, and let users realise lower costs and secure element functionality in their IoT designs.

“Delivering on our promise at the launch of the RA MCU Family last October, I’m proud to announce its expansion with the RA6M4 MCUs,” said Roger Wendelken, senior vice president at Renesas. “They offer customers best-in-class performance and security enhancements built with Arm Cortex-M33 cores that clearly deliver more memory, memory interface expansion, better power efficiency and wake-up time, and more connectivity options. We intend to delight our customers who appreciate the higher level of security and IoT connectivity that the RA6M4 MCU group brings with the confidence and ease of use that only comes by designing with Arm and securing with Arm TrustZone technology.”

Built on a 40nm process, the MCUs drive power consumption down to 99µA/MHz while running the CoreMark algorithm from flash. The MCUs also support wakeup times of 30µs from standby using an on-chip oscillator. Their integration up to 1Mbyte code flash memory and 256kbyte of SRAM (64kbyte with ECC) also make the MCUs suited to low power and safety applications.

“IoT edge and endpoint technologies are opening up new opportunities for developers to build smaller devices, with greater privacy and less dependence on the cloud,” said Dipti Vachani, senior vice president at Arm. “The RA6M4 MCUs move intelligence closer to the data, with Arm TrustZone technology built in to ensure privacy and data integrity, helping securely accelerate the growth of IoT.”

The FSP lets engineers re-use their legacy code and combine it with software from partners across the Arm ecosystem to speed implementation of complex connectivity and security functions. It includes Free RTOS and middleware, offering a device-to-cloud option for developers. These out-of-box options can be replaced and expanded with any other RTOS or middleware.

The FSP provides a host of efficiency enhancing tools for developing projects targeting the MCUs. The e² Studio integrated development environment provides a familiar development cockpit from which the key steps of project creation, module selection and configuration, code development, code generation, and debugging are managed.