Renesas Electronics Expands 28nm Cross-Domain Automotive Microcontroller Lineup

RH850/U2B MCUs drive ECU integration for zone and domain control applications with improved performance, safety and motor control gas pedal IP

Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723), a global provider of semiconductor solutions, today announced a new set of powerful microcontrollers (MCUs), the RH850/U2B, that integrate multiple applications into a single chip and enable unified electronic control units (ECUs) for evolving electrical and electronic (E/E) architectures. The RH850/U2B cross domain MCU combines high performance, flexibility, immunity and security, and is built to meet the demanding workload requirements of vehicles in operation, including applications such as hybrid ICE and xEV motor inverters, high-end area control, Internet gateway and domain control.

28nm Automotive MCU RH850 U2B Accelerates ECU Integration for Area & Domain Architectures

Customers can also combine this with Renesas' R-Car S4 SoC for automotive central gateway systems to create scalable solutions for E/E architectures.

The future of automotive system design lies in vehicle-centric, domain-oriented E/E architectures; it also raises the demand for automotive chips to meet the challenges these innovative architectures bring to next-generation vehicles," said Naoki Yoshida, vice president of the Automotive Digital Products Marketing Division at Renesas Electronics. RH850/U2B expands Renesas' cross-domain MCU product family, bringing customers with higher levels of performance, memory integration, and hardware-based support for new zone and domain control applications, specifically targeting powertrain and HEV/EV, while meeting the demanding requirements needed for vehicle systems such as cost, security and encryption."

Designed for zone and domain applications, the 28nm RH850/U2B builds on the key features of Renesas' RH850/E2x series for powertrain and RH850/C1M-Ax series for HEV/EV motor control, adding new gas pedal IP, improved performance and security. These improvements enable users to integrate multiple ECU functions into a single ECU while meeting stringent automotive-grade security, encryption and real-time operability requirements.

Hypervisor, based on MCU hardware virtualization mechanisms, allows multiple software systems with up to ISO26262 ASIL D functional security levels to operate independently without interference at high performance, reducing the time required for virtualization to ensure real-time processing. /U2B supports safe and fast zero-wait OTA software updates; the use of dual-zone embedded flash memory allows the ECU to update and save images while the MCU is in operating mode, and enables the ECU to run from source code in the event of a failure. The integrated Motor Control Accelerator IP (EMU3S) works in concert with multiple dedicated motor control timer structures such as GTM v4.1 and TSG3 to achieve high speed rotation while significantly reducing CPU processing load. The dedicated Data Flow Processor (DFP) gas pedal IP enables the CPU to offload heavy computation operations for complex control.

Key Additional Features of the RH850/U2B MCU

• -Up to eight 400MHz performance cores; four of these cores feature a lock-step architecture to create super performance in an automotive-grade MCU with built-in flash memory for ASIL-D and ASIL-B applications
• -Supports Evita Full-class integrated security features, including elliptic curve encryption algorithms for enhanced protection against cyber attacks
• -New high-performance motor control gas pedal IP (EMU3S) for flexible use with multiple dedicated motor control timer architectures such as GTM v4.1 and TSG3
• -Dedicated resolver/digital converter gas pedal IP (RDC3X) that processes analog signals from motor rotation angle sensors (resolver) or inductive position sensors
• -DR1000C: A RISC-V based parallel co-processor IP; with vector expansion (DFP), licensed from NSITEXE, to support fast execution of complex mathematical algorithms
• -Frontier communication interfaces, including Gigabit Ethernet TSN with switch support
• -Multiple instances of AES128 lockstep modules for conflict-free, deterministic security and secure communications

Availability Information

RH850/U2B MCU will be available in prototype form in April 2022