Renesas RX72T MCUs for motor control in robots

Renesas Electronics has introduced the RX72T series of 32-bit motor control microcontrollers (MCUs) with dedicated hardware accelerator IP to perform the complex, high-speed computations required for motor control in robots and other industrial equipment. The group delivers high performance, achieving an 1160 CoreMark score as measured by EEMBC Benchmarks — said to be the highest level for a 5 V MCU operating at 200 MHz.

The MCUs include dedicated accelerator hardware that enables the high-speed position control and speed control calculations required for implementing servo motor control in compact industrial robots. This allows the current control loop calculation to be performed in less than 1.5 µs, enabling users to independently develop servo systems where previously they only had the option of purchasing existing servo systems.

The MCUs implement only the single-precision floating point trigonometric function (sin, cos, arctan, hypot) and a register bank save function in hardware as dedicated IP. This retains the flexibility of software-based solutions while increasing the calculation speed. Furthermore, the register bank save function increases the speed and precision of interrupt handling, improving the device computation performance. The MCUs also include 200 MHz PWM inverter control timers with up to four channels of three-phase control, two channels of five-phase control or 10 channels of single-phase control.

Customers working with Renesas’s Failure Detection e-AI Solutions for motors to improve production and productivity can pair these products with the MCUs. Characteristic data (current and speed values) that indicate the motor state can be used directly to implement motor control and e-AI-based failure detection with a single MCU. The MCUs also feature hardware-based system failsafe functions and a hardware cryptography module that can be used to encrypt/decrypt communications data.