Renesas RA4M3 MCUs

Renesas Electronics has released its 32-bit RA4M3 group of microcontrollers (MCUs), designed to boost operating performance up to 100 MHz using the Arm Cortex-M33 core based on Armv8-M architecture. The MCUs make it easy to develop safe and secure IoT edge devices for low-power applications, such as security, metering, industrial and HVAC applications.

The MCUs are designed for low-power IoT applications that require a balance of high performance, strong security and high memory. They combine TrustZone technology with Renesas’s enhanced Secure Crypto Engine, enabling users to realise secure element functionality in a wide variety of IoT designs. The Secure Crypto Engine incorporates multiple symmetric and asymmetric cryptography accelerators, advanced key management, security life cycle management, power analysis resistance and tamper detection.

The MCUs drive power consumption down to 119 µA/MHz in active mode running CoreMark from flash memory and 1.6 mA in standby mode with standby wake-up times as fast as 30 µs — a critical element for IoT applications operating in the field for extended periods. For memory-intense applications, designers can combine Quad-SPI and SD-card interfaces with the MCUs’ built-in embedded memory to increase capacity.

The background operation and Flash Bank SWAP option is suitable for memory-optimised firmware updates running in the background. The increased embedded RAM with parity/ECC also makes the MCUs useful for safety-critical applications. Several integrated features are included to lower BOM costs, including capacitive touch sensing; embedded flash memory densities up to 1 MB; and analog, communications and memory peripherals.