Renesas Electronics introduces the RX72M microcontroller portfolio for industrial applications

     Renesas Electronics Corporation announced the launch of the RX Microcontroller (MCU) family of RX72M product groups with built-in EtherCAT® slave station controllers for industrial Ethernet communications. This new flagship product group in the Renesas RX family brings high-performance, single-chip solutions with large memory capacities to industrial devices requiring control and communication functions, such as compact industrial robots, programmable logic controllers, remote I/O and industrial gateways.

     EtherCAT applications in industrial Ethernet are growing rapidly, with dedicated MCUS, ics, and high-end system-on-chip (SoC) devices for EtherCAT communication. The new RX72M group performs well, achieving a CoreMark score of 1396 on the EEMBC® benchmark when operating at 240MHz (Note 1); Application processing and EtherCAT communication can be implemented simultaneously. This product group combines a motor control MCU with on-chip EtherCAT slave station functionality, enabling industrial application developers to reduce bill of material costs (BOM) and support the miniaturization requirements required for industrial equipment design.

     Fu Tianming, vice president of Renesas Electronics' Industrial Automation Division, said, "The increasing limitation of board miniaturization on board space has become a key issue for industrial robot designers, and the RX72M product group brings a revolutionary solution to this challenge. As the world's leading MCU supplier and industrial networking solutions provider, Renesas is pleased to share our extensive embedded design expertise with the introduction of the RX72M product. "This new product reduces board area by approximately 50% compared to earlier products, while maintaining high performance and EtherCAT communication support, paving the way for simple and flexible industrial equipment design for customers."

     The RX72M product group is the first RX family MCU to include an EtherCAT slave station controller and has the highest SRAM capacity in the RX family - 1 MB SRAM and 4 MB flash memory. High-capacity SRAM allows the MCU to run multiple middleware systems, such as TCP/IP, web servers, and file systems, at high speeds without the use of external storage. It also provides flexibility to support future functionality extensions, such as the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA, note 2) standard, without the need for additional memory. The on-chip flash memory can also be run independently as two 2MB flash memory, so that the terminal device can run stably; For example, when a program is executed in one flash memory, a background rewrite can be performed in another flash memory at the same time.