Low-power Cortex-M23 MCUs for IoT end-points

Called the RA2E2 Group and part of the RA Family, they are nine small MCUs that consume little: being available in the 1.87 x 1.84mm 16pin WLCSP (wafer-level chip-scale package) and operating at 81μA/MHz, dropping to 200nA in software stand-by with fast wake.

Operation temperature can be as wide as -40 to +125°C, and the devices have: a 4.6Mbit/s I3C bus interface, ±1% on-chip oscillator, power on reset, low voltage detector, EEPROM and a temperature sensor.

“We see increasing demand for 32bit MCUs in low pin count IoT end-point applications, and the RA2E2 Group addresses that market need with the right features and performance,” said Renesas IoT v-p Roger Wendelken. “Our RA family now offers from 16 to 176 pins and from 48 to 200MHz performance.”

RA2E2 devices work across 1.6 to 5.5V, span 16 to 24pins and 16 to 64kbyte of flash memory, and have 8kbyte of ram and 2kbyte data flash. A cryptography accelerator (AES256/128), true random number generator and memory protection are also present. Use is expected in wearables, medical devices, appliances and industrial automation.

All RA devices are supported by the company’s ‘flexible software program’ (FSP) that includes drivers and middleware to ease implementing communications and security. FSP has a GUI and helps re-use legacy code, scaling through the devices of different size and accessing Arm’s ecosystem.