The RX series of Renesas is an acronym for Renesas eXtreme - the forward leaning powerhouse of the Renesas family. In the past, the RX has been the cutting edge of microcontroller technology, providing affordable yet powerful controllers with a unique core. As with all things technology, stagnation means failure to succeed in the market, so Renesas never stopped developing. As of about a year ago, the second generation of the RX core was released, the RXv2 core.
The overarching architecture of the RXv2 has not been significantly changed, allowing for backwards code compatibility with the original RX core. However, the top speed has been upped from 100 MHz to 120 MHz and the DMIPS/MHz have also increased from 1.65 DMIPS/MHz to 2.00 DMIPS/MHz, giving the capability of up to 240 DMIPS. Code memory has been doubled from a max of 2 MB of ROM up to 4 MB ROM for increasingly complex code. They’ve also doubled the accumulators from one to two and stretched them from 48 bit to 78 bits. Even with these increases in power, the power consumption has been reduced by 40%.
The question is, what does this mean for us as engineers and designers? The simple answer is that we have the power of creating even more responsive applications with minimal or no code changes. However, as shown with the RXv2 implemented in the RX64M, a member of the RX600 family, the increase in capability is more than just faster or more of the same. With the extra clock cycles, the feature set can be extended or data can be crunched before storing or sending off, instead of dealing with the raw data. With the 40% power reduction, the RX family can even extend into certain aspects of the portable or wearable market, providing the processing power for software multi-sensor fusion plus the connectivity options to synchronize this information with cloud based infrastructure.
While expanding capabilities, the RX64M is still connected at its roots to the RX600 family. Precise timing for motor control, CAN bus and robust design for automotive integration, and increased connectivity with IEEE1588 compliant ethernet, ensuring accurate timing for measurement and control systems in a LAN. These features show that improvements can be made without pushing out other features.
The RX64M is already in a starter kit, even allowing the the chip to be programmed through the E1 programmer, giving a better development environment than some of the of the demo boards that require the use of the on-board programmer and developer. If your product is pushing the limits of your current processor, I’d recommend getting the starter kit and seeing if the RX64M, with its RXv2 core, is better suited to bringing your vision to fruition.