Renesas RA2L1 Family of Microcontrollers
32-bit MCUs offer best-in-class power consumption and innovative capacitive touch-sensing capability
Renesas has extended its RA Family of microcontrollers, launching 20 new RA2L1 Group products to provide a new option for OEMs developing IoT and Human-Machine Interface (HMI) applications which need to minimize power consumption in operating and standby modes. The RA2L1 MCUs integrate a new capacitive touch-sensing unit which offers superior sensitivity, to support operation through thick overlays as well as enabling a touchless proximity-sensing user interface.
The RA2L1 MCUs are based on the Arm® Cortex®-M23 core operating at up to 48MHz. The RA2L1 MCUs are supported by an easy-to-use Flexible Software Package (FSP) and Renesas’ partner ecosystem, providing software and hardware building block solutions which work out-of-the-box.
The RA2L1 MCUs offer ultra-low power consumption, employing an advanced power and clock-gating feature and Renesas’ 110nm low-power fabrication process. In benchmark testing, the MCUs gained an EEMBC® ULPMark™ score of 304 at 1.8V, a best-in-class power rating. This means that in many end products users can achieve average power consumption close to standby levels, extending run-times in battery-powered applications.
The advanced capacitive touch-sensing IP in the RA2L1 MCUs supports sensing through acrylic or glass panels more than 10mm thick. This is enough for use in household equipment which has thick doors or partitions. The MCU also implements proximity sensing and 3D gestures, a useful capability in applications which need to restrict touches for hygiene or safety reasons.
The RA2L1’s capacitive-touch noise tolerance meets the requirements of IEC /EN61000-4-3 level 4 for radiated emissions and EN61000-4-6 level 3 for conducted emissions, to ensure reliable operation with minimal sensing error.
The RA2L1 Group products are highly integrated, incorporating analog, communications, and timing peripherals, and safety and security functions.
The RA2L1 MCUs also offer an IEC 60730 self-test library, and feature integrated safety functions which provide confirmation of normal operation. Customers can easily use these safety functions to perform MCU self-diagnostics. In addition, the RA2L1 includes an AES cryptography accelerator, true random number generator, and memory protection units, which provide the fundamental blocks required to develop a secure IoT system.
The RA2L1 MCUs with FSP allow customers to re-use legacy code, and combine it with software from partners across the Arm ecosystem to speed implementation of complex connectivity and security functions. The FSP includes the FreeRTOS real-time operating system and middleware to provide a device-to-cloud option for developers.
RA2L1 MCU Features
| RA2L1 Applications
|
Evaluation Kit
The EK-RA2L1 evaluation kit enables users to develop embedded systems using the RA2L1 MCUs and Renesas' FSP and e2 studio tools. The kit is supplied with a ‘Quick Start’ example project to accelerate evaluation.
