Renesas — RA6M5 Series Microcontrollers

The RA6M5 Group microcontrollers, part of the Renesas RA6 series of microcontrollers, provide a wide array of security and communications functions to facilitate in-the-field secure software updating of IoT devices.

The RA6M5 MCUs employ a 200 MHz Arm® Cortex®-M33 core, which provides strong security capabilities including Arm TrustZone® secure partitioning technology. The MCUs also feature the Renesas Secure Crypto Engine, which incorporates multiple symmetric and asymmetric cryptography accelerators, advanced key management, security lifecycle management, resistance to power analysis, and tamper detection.

These RA6M5 Group MCUs offer the same security features and software support as the Renesas RA6M4 MCUs, which have achieved PSA Level 2 and SESIP 1 certifications. This combination of features enables OEMs to use these MCUs to realize secure element functionality.

As well as scoring highly on security, these MCUs provide a rich set of high-speed communications capabilities, including CAN FD, an Ethernet controller with direct memory access, Full-Speed and High-Speed USB, and multiple serial interfaces.

The MCUs also provide great flexibility and capacity to store and access code and data. Integrating up to 2 Mbytes of Flash memory and 512 kbytes of RAM, including 64 kbytes with error correction code, the RA6M5 MCUs also provide an OctaSPI interface which enables designers to extend the on-chip resources with access to external Flash memory.

The memory block-swap feature, as well as strong security, make the RA6M5 Group MCUs the best choice for applications in which in-the-field firmware updates will be installed. After new firmware is written to Flash in the background, a selectable number of 32 kbyte Flash blocks can be swapped to run the new code.

The RA6M5 Group is supported by an easy-to-use Flexible Software Package (FSP), which includes a best-in-class Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) driver. The FSP uses a GUI to simplify the development process, while also making it easy for product manufacturers to transfer functions from an original 8- or 16-bit MCU-based design.