Renesas is aiming at applications that need a fast RTOS (real-time operating system) as well as a sophisticated user interface with a group of microcontrollers built around a single 1GHz 64bit Arm Cortex-A55 core.
RZ/A3UL MCUs, as they will be known, are intended to boot FreeRTOS or Azure RTOS within one second. “This feature is ideal for systems that require a fast response time such as industrial equipment, home appliances and office automation equipment with liquid crystal displays or control panels, as well as audio equipment and point-of-sale terminals”, according to the company.
Some of the parts have provision for DDR3L/DDR4 ram, which enables “an 1,280 x 720 class display and HMI utilising camera input or various types of sensors”, said Renesas. All parts have an Octal-SPI ram or flash interface (MXSMIO OPI – Macronix serial multi I/O octa peripheral interface).
Other interfaces available within the group include: MIPI CSI-2 camera, parallel display output, USB2.0 host, Gigabit Ethernet, SD card host, CAN and SSIF-2 (serial sound). When present, the DDR interface is 16bit DDR4-1600 / DDR3L-1333.
To allow a PCB to cover multiple products, peripheral functions and package pin assignments are compatible with the Linux-intended RZ/G2UL group, which also has Cortex-A55 cores, and the company’s RISC-V-based RZ/Five MCUs.
Renesas is a license provider of Azure RTOS for the RZ Family, it said, so “users can download Azure RTOS from GitHub and get started immediately”, and it has a software package that includes FreeRTOS and HAL (hardware abstraction layer) drivers for developers to use as a reference.
There are a couple of similar evaluation kits (above left and below) one that boots from OctaFlash and the other which boots over QSPI. Both require the processor on a SMARC 2.1 carrier board, which is the same one used for the Linux RZ/G2UL and RISC-V RZ/Five MCUs.
The RZ/A3UL MCU product page can be found here, and there is a pin compatibility guide for RZ/A3UL, RZ/G2UL (type-1) and RZ/Five
