CANopen protocol stack available for Renesas' RX231 MCUs

22nd October 2015

Renesas

Nat Bowers

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Datasheet

Renesas Electronics Europe and port have announced the availability of a highly efficient CANopen protocol stack for Renesas’ smart 32-bit RX231 MCUs. The RX231 series provides large on-chip SRAM of up to 64kB and up to 512kB of on-chip flash, paired with one CAN interface, which is 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.

The embedded CAN module on the RX231 includes 20 buffers, 16 of which can be programmed to be shared between receive and transmit functions, creating two receive FIFO’s and a transmit FIFO. A powerful acceptance filter selects which messages to receive according to 16 receive rules allowing the user a great deal of flexibility in creating incoming message handling strategies. 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.

Bernd Westhoff, Manager, Global RX Product Marketing team, Renesas Electronics Europe, commented: “Amongst the other available industrial communication protocols, CANopen remains a market leader especially in the fields of industrial automation and medical applications where an easy manageable protocol with a small memory footprint for reliable low bandwidth communication is essential. The widespread popularity of CANopen in those applications is supported by Renesas’ latest 32bit RX231 MCU with embedded CAN interface. These RX MCUs, combined with the well-known CANopen stack supported by port, provide an excellent foundation for fast and smart development using the powerful embedded CAN interfaces.”

The CANopen stack follows the strict and very efficient coding and documentation standards established by port. These standards result in a very small memory footprint (less than 19kB Flash / 3kB RAM) as well as a high execution speed and easily readable code. For easy implementation, port offers board support packages for the standard Renesas Starter Kits. PORT also offers CANopen training, integration workshops and 'be up to date' service maintenance agreements.

The RX231 MCU group with embedded CAN comes in 48- to 100-pin packages with on-chip flash memory of 128 to 512kB and 32B to 64kB of on-chip SRAM. The MCUs offer a maximum operating frequency of 54MHz. As part of the enhanced RXv2 CPU core architecture, the RX231 incorporates an on-chip 32-bit multiplier, single-precision floating-point unit and a 32-bit enhanced barrel shifter for dramatically improved operation processing performance.