Renesas Unveils RA8 MCU for Graphics and AI Applications
Renesas Electronics Corporation has introduced the RA8D1 microcontroller (MCU) group. The RA8D1 group is the second in Renesas’ RA8 Series, the first MCUs based on the Arm® Cortex®-M85 processor.
RA8D1 MCUs deliver breakthrough performance of over 6.39 CoreMark/MHz1 combined with ample memory, graphics, and peripheral functions optimized to address diverse graphics display solutions, and Voice/Vision Multimodal AI requirements for a range of applications in building automation, home appliances, smart home, consumer, and medical market segments.
All RA8 Series MCUs take advantage of the high performance of the Arm Cortex-M85 processor and Arm’s Helium™ technology with a vector/SIMD instruction set extension that provides up to a 4X performance boost for digital signal processor (DSP) and machine learning (ML) implementations over the Cortex-M7 core. This added performance is ideal for graphics and neural network processing and can eliminate the need for a separate hardware accelerator in some applications.
The new RA8D1 devices include a high-resolution graphics LCD controller with parallel RGB and MIPI-DSI interfaces to LCD panels, a 2D graphics drawing engine, a 16-bit camera interface (CEU), multiple external memory interfaces for storage of frame buffer and graphics assets, and 176 and 224 pin packages. This feature set is combined with professional quality graphics user interface software solutions from SEGGER emWin and Microsoft GUIX fully integrated into the Renesas Flexible Software Package (FSP).
Daryl Khoo, Vice President of the IoT Platform Division at Renesas, said, “There is growing demand for high-quality displays to improve user experiences. The introduction of the RA8D1 MCUs showcases the design capabilities and market knowledge that have made Renesas the world leader in MCUs. These new devices take advantage of the unprecedented performance of the Cortex-M85 core and Helium technology to meet our customers increasing requirements for better display solutions and fast-growing vision AI implementations such as people and object detection, face recognition, image classification, and pose estimation.”
“Plumerai licenses highly accurate AI solutions to customers developing smart home cameras and IOT devices,” said Roeland Nusselder, CEO of Plumerai. “We have ported our Plumerai People Detection AI software to the new RA8D1 MCU that includes the powerful Arm Cortex-M85 CPU with Helium vector extensions. The RA8D1 speeds up our software by 6.5x compared to an Arm Cortex-M7 using Arm’s CMSIS-NN kernels. There’s a big demand for our AI solutions in home security, smart buildings, home appliances and retail. Using the RA8 MCUs from Renesas, we can now fulfill this demand,” Daryl Khoo added.