Renesas has released a general-purpose MCU to enhance its existing RISC-V portfolio, and this is its first MCU using a RISC-V core developed internally at the company. This product joins the previously launched ASSP products for motor control and voice-driven HMI systems.
The R9A02G021 general-purpose microcontroller features an interesting mix of analogue and digital peripherals. The device has 128 kB of program memory which supports in-field updates, thanks to the small erasable block size granularity of 2 kB, and the capability to swap the initial 16 kB startup section for implementing an updatable user bootloader code. To make the update process even more reliable, a flash shield function preserves areas from accidental erasure and the protection can be made permanent.
For software IP confidentiality, a flash read protection function allows the user to define a memory area to hold program code which can only be fetched for execution but not read out as data. This effectively creates an executable section that is protected from simple copying. Production control can be implemented using the Unique ID (a read-only device unique serial number, programmed at the Renesas factory), and the User ID, a 64-bit user-defined value.
The MCU has a 10-channel 12-bit ADC, a two-channel 8-bit DAC, two comparators, and an on-chip temperature sensor. The ADC and comparators can be used over the whole operating voltage range of 1,6 to 5,5 V, and the ADC can also accept an external voltage reference. UART, SPI, and I2C communication interfaces are also integrated.
The unit is perfectly suited to battery-operated applications by having a standby current consumption of 300 nA with all SRAM contents retained. In this condition, the application can quickly resume operation in just 4 µs, ready to react to the external wakeup event. Long standby times can be achieved by means of a real-time clock or the internal 32-bit low-power timer.
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