Winbond Electronics Corporation, a leading global supplier of semiconductor memory solutions, announced today the official confirmation that its HyperRAM and SpiStack (NOR+NAND) can be operated with Renesas’ RZ/A2M Arm-based microprocessors (MPUs). Customers of the RZ/A2M can benefit from Winbond’s long-term supply for various types of external memory, including DRAM, NOR Flash, and NAND Flash which are currently the mainstream of embedded systems.

Renesas’s RZ/A2M is suitable for Human Machine Interface (HMI), especially HMI applications with cameras. It supports Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI), a camera interface that is widely used in mobile devices, and is equipped with a dynamically reconfigurable processor (DRP) for high-speed image processing. The RZ/A2M also features two Ethernet channels and it can enhance security functions with a cryptographic hardware accelerator. Thus, the RZ/A2M provides safe and secure high-speed network connection which can be used for image recognition in broad system applications, from consumer electronics to industrial equipment.

Winbond HyperRAM is ideal for embedded AI and image processing for classification, in which the electronics circuit needs to be made as small as possible, while providing sufficient storage and data bandwidth to support compute-intensive workloads such as image recognition, and SpiStack, on the other hand, gives designers the flexibility to store code in the NOR die and data in the NAND die with smallest form-factor.  

“As embedded AI systems become more sophisticated and complex, the use of RZ/A2M with external memory can support the increasing data size of application code or trained models,” says Renesas. “With the confirmation that RZ/A2M can operate with Winbond HyperRAM & SpiStack, customers will be able to obtain external RAM and Flash from Winbond all at once, and use our product without any concerns,” said Shigeki Kato, Vice President of the Enterprise Infrastructure Business Division at Renesas.