CANopen Protocol Stack available for Renesas’ 32-Bit RX600 Microcontroller Series

With the large RAM of up to 128 KB and up to 2 MB flash embedded, the Renesas RX600 series offers up to three channels of Controller Area Network interfaces, which are fully compliant with the CAN 2.0B and the ISO11898-1 (standard and extended frames) standards, and is therefore well-suited to industrial and consumer applications requiring CAN interfaces.

Each of the embedded CAN modules includes 32 mailboxes, of which eight can also be configured as FIFO mailboxes. A powerful acceptance filter mask provides up to eight different masks to be individually set up for each of four mailboxes, which can be enabled and disabled separately. In addition, a 16-bit counter offers a time stamp function. The CAN modules can interact with Renesas’ RX CPU by using different interrupts such as reception complete, transmission complete, receive FIFO, transmit FIFO, and error interrupts.

The RX600 series of MCUs has a maximum operating frequency of 100 MHz. In combination with the enhanced CPU core architecture, it provides an overall processing performance of 165 DMIPS executing code from embedded zero wait state flash. The MCUs also incorporate an on-chip 32-bit multiplier, single-precision floating-point unit and a 32-bit enhanced barrel shifter for dramatically improved operation processing performance.

The RX600 series also includes a variety of on-chip peripheral functions, such as high-functionality timers and four DMA controller channels as well as Ethernet MAC and up to two USB units (Host/OTG/Device). Additional features include up to 13 freely scalable SCIs, supporting UART, SIO and I2C communication, 21 channels of 12-bit A/D converter, eight channels of 10-bit A/D converter, two 10-bit D/A converter channels and a CRC calculation circuit to increase reliability.

“As well as its traditional use in automotive companies, the CAN protocol has gained widespread popularity in applications ranging from industrial automation to medical electronics. Renesas’ latest MCUs simplify CAN-based designs because the RX600 MCU series ranges from low-end to high-end flash-based CAN controllers,” said Bernd Westhoff, Product Manager of the Renesas Electronics Europe IBG business unit. “These RX MCUs, combined with the well-known CANopen stack supported by port GmbH, provide an excellent foundation for fast and smart development using the powerful embedded CAN interfaces.”

The RX600 series with embedded CAN comes in 48-pin to 176-pin packages with on-chip flash memory from 64 KB to 2 MB and RAM memory from 8 KB to 128 KB.

The CANopen stack follows the strict and very efficient coding and documentation standards established by port GmbH. These standards result in the very small memory footprints of CANopen as well as high execution speed and easily readable code. For easy implementation, port GmbH offers board support packages for the standard Renesas Starter Kits.