Renesas Electronics Corporation recently launched 15 new products in the RZ/A1 Group of embedded microprocessor (MPU) solutions for creating sophisticated human-machine interface (HMI) implementations for the "smart society" of the future.

The new products feature 10Mb of on-chip RAM and capabilities needed to implement an HMI, such as camera input, hardware accelerated graphics output, OpenVG 1.1 and audio functions.

Without the need for additional external memory (DRAM), the devices enable the implementation of WXGA-resolution graphics display without concerns about the long-term procurement of DRAM, achieving improved system performance, reduced power consumption, and lower system cost overall. By using on-chip RAM, there are no bandwidth limitations imposed by the pin counts of the chips. Wide-band, low-latency memory access is possible, enabling overall system performance to be increased by as much as 30 per cent to 50 per cent.

The new RZ/A1 Series products employ ARM CPUs, which benefit from a global ecosystem of development tools and software, alongside peripheral functions that have been inherited from the Renesas SH7260 Series, which has a proven track record in a wide range of HMI applications, and further enhanced. The use of a CPU designed by ARM allows access to the ARM ecosystem, contributing to shorter system development cycles.

Furthermore, in an industry first Renesas and ARM are jointly developing a version of the real-time OS of the Cortex-M, RTX CMSIS (Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard) RTOS, for the Cortex-A, which provides superior throughput processing performance. This will enable easy porting of application resources developed for the Cortex-M to the Cortex-A and provide performance scalability in fields requiring real-time performance.

By: Docmemory
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