Renesas just introduced its RA8P1 microcontroller (MCU) group aimed at Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) applications and real-time analytics. The AI-accelerated MCUs combining the Arm Cortex-M85 and Cortex-M33 CPUs cores at 1GHz and 250MHz performance respectively, with added Arm Ethos-U55 Neural Processing Unit (NPU). This combination delivers CPU performance of over 7300 CoreMarks and AI performance of 256GOPS at 500MHz.
The RA8P1 has been designed to meet the growing number of edge and endpoint AI applications, which, according to Renesas’s figures, is growing at a CAGR of 85% between 2017 and 2025. Alongside it, there’s a growing integration of AI on the edge, which requires further acceleration, like NPUs, that can handle the load of neural networks (convolutional and recurrent neural networks). The Ethos-U55 supports most commonly used NNs, including DS-CNN, ResNet, Mobilenet TinyYolo and more. Depending on the neural network used, the Ethos-U55 provides up to 35x more inferences per second than the Cortex-M85 processor on its own.
“There is explosive growth in demand for high-performance edge AIoT applications. We are thrilled to introduce what we believe are the best MCUs to address this trend,” said Daryl Khoo, Vice President of Embedded Processing Marketing Division at Renesas. “Customers are eager to employ these new MCUs in multiple AI applications.”
The RA8P1 MCUs also rely on embedded 1MB Magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) in the new MCUs, which is one of the most retentive and enduring technologies, offering the highest speeds, compared with Flash.
For highest security and privacy of handling data on the edge, the RA8P1 MCUs include Renesas’s own Security IP (RSIP-E50D) which includes cryptographic accelerators, including CHACHA20, Ed25519, NIST ECC curves up to 521 bits, enhanced RSA up to 4K, SHA2 and SHA3. The new MCUs also provides strong hardware Root-of-Trust and Secure Boot with First Stage Bootloader (FSBL) in immutable storage. XSPI interfaces with decryption-on-the-fly (DOTF) allow encrypted code images to be stored in external flash and decrypted on the fly as it is securely transferred to the MCU for execution.
The RA8P1 MCUs are available now. Renesas is also shipping an RA8P1 Evaluation Kit. More information is available at renesas.com/RA8P1. Samples and kits can be ordered either on the Renesas website or through distributors.
