Renesas RX72M MCUs with EtherCAT support

Renesas Electronics has introduced the RX72M group of microcontrollers (MCUs) featuring an EtherCAT slave controller for industrial Ethernet communication. The product group offers a high-performance, single-chip MCU solution with large memory capacities for industrial equipment requiring control and communication functions such as compact industrial robots, programmable logic controllers, remote I/O and industrial gateways.

The MCUs enable an approximately 50% reduction in circuit board area compared with earlier devices while maintaining high performance and EtherCAT support. They achieve the high performance of a 1396 CoreMark score at 240 MHz as measured by EEMBC benchmarks and are capable of both application processing and EtherCAT communication. Combining a motor-control MCU with on-chip EtherCAT slave functions allows industrial application developers to reduce their bill of materials (BOM) and support the miniaturisation levels required for industrial equipment design.

The MCU group includes an EtherCAT slave controller featuring the RX family’s highest SRAM capacity — 1 MB of SRAM — and 4 MB of flash memory. The large-capacity SRAM allows the MCUs to run multiple memory-intensive middleware systems, such as TCP/IP, web servers and file systems, at high speed without the use of external memory. It also provides flexibility for the support of future functional expansions, such as OPC United Architecture, with no additional memory required. The onboard flash memory operates as two 2 MB banks, which enables stable operation of the end equipment, such as executing a program in one flash memory while simultaneously conducting background rewrites in the other flash memory.