Industry's first general-purpose 32-bit RISC-V MCUs with internally developed CPU core

Renesas Electronics Corporation has released the industry's first general-purpose 32-bit RISC-V-based MCUs built with an internally developed CPU core. While many MCU providers have recently joined investment alliances to advance the development of RISC-V products, Renesas has already independently designed and tested a new RISC-V core, which is now implemented in a commercial product and available globally. The latest R9A02G021 group of MCUs delivers embedded systems designers a clear path to developing a wide range of power-conscious, cost-sensitive applications based on the open-source ISA.

While most of today's RISC-V solutions target specific applications, this group of MCUs has been developed to serve multiple end markets, such as IoT sensors, consumer electronics, medical devices, small appliances, and industrial systems. Like existing general-purpose MCUs, designers will have access to a full-scale development environment for the R9A02G021, provided by Renesas and its extensive network of toolchain partners. This will allow them to greatly reduce costs, engineering resources, and development time.

"From our RISC-V purpose-built ASSPs to this new general-purpose MCU, our goal is to deliver commercially viable products that customers can take to mass production quickly while demonstrating the benefits of the RISC-V architecture," said Daryl Khoo, vice president of Embedded Processing 1st Business Division at Renesas. "In addition, customers often face with complex design challenges and tradeoffs such as performance, power consumption, memory, or a choice of CPU architecture. The new RISC-V MCU provides an additional degree of choice to customers who want to use products with the open architecture."

As an early adopter of RISC-V, Renesas has a rich offering of RISC-V application-specific products, including its 32-bit voice-control and motor-control ASSP devices and RZ/Five 64-bit general purpose microprocessors (MPUs), which were built on CPU cores developed by Andes Technology Corp. The R9A02G021 group represents the first generation of general-purpose MCUs based on the internally developed RISC-V core by the company that will roll out over the next several years.

"Until now, the MCU, a key potential market for RISC-V has been lacking strong commercial designs from leading suppliers which make up around 85% of the MCU market," said Tom Hackenberg, principal analyst, Computing and Software, More Moore Business Line at Yole Group. "With Renesas introducing full commercial availability of a RISC-V multimarket MCU to its diverse MCU portfolio, as well as much needed support from well recognized industry standard tools suppliers, the RISC-V market is poised to finally start accelerating growth. As other leading vendors follow Renesas' example, RISC-V should approach 10% of the overall MCU market by the end of 2029 with significant growth potential beyond."

The RISC-V group delivers ample performance with clock speeds up to 48MHz while consuming extremely low power on standby at 0.3µA. It provides 128KB of fast flash memory, 16KB of SRAM, and 4KB of flash memory for data storage. Designed to withstand harsh conditions, the MCUs can operate reliably at ambient temperatures ranging from -40C to 125C. The MCUs come with standard serial communications interfaces, as well as DAC and ADC functions to facilitate high-speed and secure connections with sensors, displays, and other external modules. The wide 1.6V to 5.5V input voltage range enables low-voltage, low-current operation and allows noise immunity, making the R9A02G021 ideal for battery-powered devices.

These RISC-V MCUs are fully supported by the company's e² studio IDE, which is offered to customers at no cost. The comprehensive toolchain includes a code configurator, the LLVM compiler, and an FPB. Complete development environments are also available from the company's partners: IAR with its Embedded Workbench IDE and I-jet debug probe and SEGGER with the Embedded Studio IDE, J-Link debug probes, and Flasher production programmers. Supporting documentation includes the FPB user manual, a Getting Started guide, schematics, BOM, and Gerber files.