Renesas' RA2E2 Group delivers low power in small package

The 48-MHz RA2E2 Group enables fast design cycles and easy upgrades to other RA Family devices.

The RA2E2 Group MCUs are designed to address the needs of demanding IoT endpoint applications, including wearables, medical devices, appliances and industrial automation. They offer the industry’s lowest operating power in their class, consuming only 81uA/MHz in active mode with software standby current of only 200nA with fast wakeup, the company claim.

The devices also support a wide temperature range of Ta = -40/+125°C for harsh IoT operating environments.

The RA2E2 Group supports an I³C bus interface and integrates cost-saving peripheral functions, including an on-chip oscillator with precision of +/-1%, power on reset and low voltage detector, EEPROM, and a temperature sensor.

The Renesas RA Family includes over 160 parts ranging from 48MHz to 200MHz.

The RA Family MCUs offer power consumption specifications, a very wide range of communications options, and security options, including Arm TrustZone technology.

All RA devices are supported by the Renesas Flexible Software Program (FSP) that includes efficient drivers and middleware to ease the implementation of communications and security. The FSP’s GUI simplifies and accelerates the development process. It enables flexible use of legacy code as well as easy compatibility and scalability with other RA Family devices. Designers using FSP also have access to the extensive Arm ecosystem, offering a range of tools that help speed time-to-market, as well as Renesas’ extensive partner network.

“We see increasing demand for 32-bit MCUs in low-pin-count IoT endpoint applications, and the RA2E2 Group addresses that market need with the right features and performance,” said Roger Wendelken, senior vice president in the IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit at Renesas.

“Our RA family now offers solutions from 16 to 176-pins and from 48 to 200MHz performance, all supported by our FSP that enables easy and fast transition of design IP between different devices.”

RA2E2 MCU Group

The RA2E2 Group includes nine different devices, spanning from 16-pin to 24-pin packages, and from 16KB to 64KB of flash memory along with 8KB of SRAM.

The devices also include 2KB of data flash memory. They are also the only MCUs in their class to offer an I³C bus interface, delivering high-speed communications of 4.6Mbps while reducing power consumption, Renesas claim. The RA2E2 Group delivers leading security features as well, including a cryptography accelerator (AES256/128), a true random number generator and memory protection units.

Availability

To help engineers get started, Renesas is offering the EK-RA2E2 Evaluation Kit.