Renesas Expands Smart Factory Solutions Based On RX600 Microcontroller Series

The Renesas vision of Smart Factory, aligned with its Smart Society philosophy, establishes the realization of driving technologies and applications that focus on safe, adaptable, and connected equipment and processes – all to reduce cost, eliminate waste, and lower energy consumption. This move brings leading-edge, real-time computing performance and connectivity to Renesas’ industrial automation focus ranging from programmable logic controllers (PLCs), I/O modules, industrial drives, managed switches, intelligent sensors and countless field devices.

“As demands on industrial automation evolve, customers are looking for embedded approaches that allow them to integrate new technologies and additional layers of intelligence, while saving on development cost and time,” said Ritesh Tyagi, senior director, Microcontroller Products & Solutions Marketing, Renesas Electronics America Inc. “Collaboration plays a key role in achieving these goals, and our partnership with leading providers across the ecosystem, such as IXXAT and Real Time Automation, to provide proven IP and solutions helps customers bring products to market more quickly and cost effectively.”
Renesas Expands Industrial Networking Solutions

Industrial networking technologies have evolved to support all levels of factory communications, from the plant level down to the device level. The growing use of Ethernet as the physical infrastructure of popular protocols has provided a base from which more applications and systems connect.

“Ethernet-based industrial networking is becoming a horizontal technology in the factory floor, which applies to a wide range of applications,” Tyagi explains. “By supporting leading protocols such as Ethernet/IP, CANopen over Ethernet and the like, our Ethernet-equipped RX600 MCUs are the ideal platform, with our advanced processor core architecture, multi-level interrupts, and dedicated Ethernet channel DMA enabling efficient partitioning between the communications and the control operations.”

Working with partners like IXXAT and Real Time Automation to ensure IP is functional on the RX platform, Renesas helps customers streamline their product qualification and certification processes to significantly reduce or eliminate risk and shorten development time. This collaboration also provides a scalable business model for OEMs with price points that are effective at smaller and higher volumes.

IXXAT and Real Time Automation offer reference designs for Renesas’ RX600 series of MCUs. For example, IXXAT provides support for CANopen higher layer protocol stacks which can be applied over an Ethernet or CAN physical layers. Real Time Automation offers a royalty-free Ethernet/IP Scanner and Adapter software development solution. These solutions are available as reference designs with the Renesas RX63N Demo Kit (RDK).

Both IXXAT and Real Time Automation offers complete design services, and are experienced in supporting popular protocols such as Profinet IO, Ethernet Powerlink, Ethernet/IP and EtherCAT. IXXAT and Real Time Automation work closely with the various protocol consortia to develop and deliver comprehensive IP support – including software stacks, APIs and hardware design assistance – that help simplify the implementation of multiple protocols. They also help streamline customers’ product qualification and certification processes through close collaboration with the protocol consortia.

Renesas’ RX600 series of MCUs is ideal for industrial Ethernet applications that require both the computational efficiency and connectivity that industrial networking systems require. The RX600 MCUs combine real-time performance with single clock instructions, DSP functionality and a built-in floating point unit that enables an efficient blend of fast execution and smaller code size. In addition, Renesas offers Ethernet PHY (1- and 2-channel) that offers hardware-based proactive cable monitoring such as highly accurate Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR), and fault detection featuring Bit Error Rate monitoring (BER), for robust and failsafe detection systems, as well as support for IEEE1588 precision timing protocol in hardware.