Renesas introduces a new RA8 MCU product family for graphical display applications and voice/vision multimodal AI applications

Renesas Electronics announced the launch of the RA8D1 microcontroller (MCU) product group. RA8D1 The second product in Renesas' RA8 family, the RA8 is the first MCU based on the Arm® Cortex®-M85 processor. The RA8D1 MCU has a breakthrough performance of more than 6.39 CoreMark/MHz (note), combined with sufficient memory and optimized graphics and peripheral functions, to meet a wide range of graphical display and voice/visual multimodal AI requirements for a wide range of applications such as building automation, home appliances, smart home, consumer and medical applications.

All RA8 series MCUS leverage the high performance of Arm Cortex-M85 processors and Arm's Helium™ technology, combined with vector /SIMD instruction set extensions, to deliver up to four times the performance gains compared to Cortex-M7 cores for digital signal processor (DSP) and machine learning (ML) implementations. This performance boost is well suited for graphics and neural network processing and can eliminate the need for separate hardware accelerators in some applications. They also implement advanced security, including Arm TrustZone® technology, Renesas Secure IP (RSIP-E51A), secure boot with first-level boot loaders in immutable storage, eight-wire SPI interface with Instant Decryption (DOTF), and more. As well as pointer validation and Branch Target recognition (PACBTI) security extensions.

Feature set optimized for graphical display solutions and visual/voice AI

The new RA8D1 products include a high-resolution graphics LCD controller with parallel RGB and MIPI-DSI interfaces for connecting the LCD display panel, a 2D graphics rendering engine, a 16-bit camera interface (CEU), multiple external memory interfaces for storing frame buffers and graphics resources, and 176 and 224 pin packages. This feature set is combined with professional quality graphical user interface software solutions from SEGGER emWin and Microsoft GUIX and is fully integrated into the Renesas Flexible Configuration Package (FSP). Renesas also supports an open-source lightweight multi-function graphics Library (LVGL), as well as a robust network of graphics and AI ecosystem partners. A full-featured graphics evaluation suite with LCD panels and camera modules completes the solution and provides a powerful development platform for graphic applications such as industrial Hmis, video doorbells, patient monitors, graphing calculators, security panels, printer display panels, and home appliance displays.

Daryl Khoo, Vice President of the IoT Platform Division at Renesas, said: "There is a growing demand for high-quality displays to improve the user experience. The introduction of the RA8D1 MCU demonstrates Renesas' design capabilities and market insight as the world's preeminent supplier of microcontrollers. "The newly released products leverage the unprecedented performance benefits of the Cortex-M85 core and Helium technology to meet the growing customer demand for better displays and rapidly evolving visual AI implementations such as person and object detection, face recognition, image classification, and pose estimation."

Roeland Nusselder, CEO of Plumerai, said: "Plumerai licenses high-precision AI solutions for customers developing smart home cameras and iot devices. We have ported the Plumerai People Detection AI software to the new RA8D1 MCU. The MCU includes a powerful Arm Cortex-M85 CPU and Helium vector extension. Compared to the Arm Cortex-M7, which uses the Arm CMSIS-NN kernel, the RA8D1 makes our software 6.5 times faster. There is a high demand for our AI solutions in home security, smart buildings, home appliances and retail, and with Renesas' RA8 MCU, we can now fully meet this demand."