Japanese electronics giant Renesas has developed a microcontroller with an integrated Bluetooth LE radio for use in building automation and home appliance applications.
 
The device is said to make it easier for embedded designers to develop safe and secure IoT endpoint devices for building automation and home appliances. It is suitable for developing IoT edge devices for wireless sensor networks, IoT hubs and add-on to gateways, and as an aggregator to IoT cloud applications. It can also be used in Industry 4.0, metering, healthcare and consumer wearables.
 
The single-chip RA4W1 MCU includes a 48MHz, 32bit Arm Cortex-M4 core and Bluetooth 5.0 core delivered in a 56-pin QFN package. Together, the RA4W1 MCU and FSP flexible software package let engineers immediately begin development with Arm ecosystem software and hardware building blocks that work out-of-the-box with RA MCUs.
 
“While offering an MCU with Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity is not new to Renesas, the addition of the RA4W1 enables our customers to easily adopt Bluetooth 5.0,” said Sakae Ito, vice president at Renesas. “Customers can also take full advantage of the on-chip MCU features, including secure crypto engine to implement strong key management for the ultimate IoT security, and best-in-class output power consumption and sensitivity to achieve a superior link budget for longer range applications.”
 
The MCU has 512kbyte flash memory, 96kbyte SRAM, and connectivity such as USB, Can and Renesas’ HMI capacitive touch technology. The secure crypto engine supports users with symmetric encryption and decryption, hash functions, true random number generation and key handling with key generation and MCU-unique key wrapping.
 
It includes Bluetooth 5.0 functions such as 2Mbit/s data throughput, all advertising extension functions with maximum advertising length (1650byte), periodic advertisements, and channel selection algorithm #2 for applications requiring large amounts of traffic.
 
It has low peak power consumption at 3.3mA during receiving and 4.5mA at 0dBm while transmitting. Sensitivity is -105dBm in 125kbit/s mode without additional loss from external components.
 
Several API functions conform to all standard profiles, including heart rate, environment sensing and automation IO profiles. These functions allow users to start and speed up prototype development and evaluation quickly.
 
The smart configurator GUI generates Bluetooth code and MCU peripheral function driver code as well as pin settings for the e² Studio integrated development environment. The Renesas QE tool for BLE generates programmes for custom profiles and embeds them in user application programmes to support application programme development.
 
And the Bluetooth Trial Tool Suite GUI allows users to perform initial wireless characteristics evaluations and Bluetooth functional verification. Users can typically have the RA4W1 evaluation board up and running with the downloadable smartphone applications demo in less than 30 minutes.
 
The device includes a high-precision, low-speed on-chip oscillator, and integrates an RF oscillator adjustment circuit and on-chip matching circuit for easy antenna connection. This integration reduces both costs and circuit board area, resulting in lower IoT equipment manufacturing costs.
 
The FSP speeds the implementation of complex functions such as connectivity and security. It features 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.