Renesas Unveils RA8D1 MCU Group: Pioneering Graphic Display and AI Applications

Renesas Electronics Corporation, a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced the launch of the RA8D1 microcontroller (MCU) group, marking a significant advancement in the realm of graphic display solutions and voice/vision multimodal AI applications. This new group, the second in Renesas’ RA8 Series, is notably the first to incorporate the high-performing Arm® Cortex®-M85 processor. Renesas’ introduction of the RA8D1 MCUs is set to revolutionize applications in building automation, smart home technology, consumer electronics, and medical sectors, delivering an unprecedented performance of over 6.39 CoreMark/MHz, coupled with comprehensive memory, graphics, and peripheral functions.

The RA8D1 MCUs are engineered to leverage the high performance of the Arm Cortex-M85 processor and Arm’s Helium™ technology. This technology includes a vector/SIMD instruction set extension, significantly boosting digital signal processor (DSP) and machine learning (ML) implementations. In fact, it offers up to a 4X performance enhancement over the Cortex-M7 core, which is ideal for graphics and neural network processing and could potentially negate the necessity for a separate hardware accelerator in certain applications. The series also stands out for its advanced security features, including Arm TrustZone® technology, Renesas Security IP (RSIP-E51A), Secure Boot with first stage bootloader in immutable storage, Octal SPI interface with Decryption-on-the-fly (DOTF), and Pointer Authentication and Branch Target Identification (PACBTI) security extension.

Focusing on graphics display solutions and vision/voice AI, the new RA8D1 devices incorporate a high-resolution graphics LCD controller with parallel RGB and MIPI-DSI interfaces to LCD display panels, a 2D graphics drawing engine, a 16-bit camera interface (CEU), and multiple external memory interfaces. These features are designed to support a wide range of applications, including industrial HMI, video doorbells, patient monitors, graphics calculators, security panels, printer display panels, and appliance displays. The devices are complemented by professional quality graphics user interface software solutions from SEGGER emWin and Microsoft GUIX, fully integrated into the Renesas Flexible Software Package (FSP). Support is also provided for the open-source Light and Versatile Graphics Library (LVGL) and a robust network of graphics and AI ecosystem partners.

Highlighting the significance of this launch, 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.”

The RA8D1 MCUs' key features include a 480 MHz Arm Cortex-M85 core with Helium and TrustZone, integrated 2MB/1MB Flash memory and 1MB SRAM, and graphics peripherals supporting resolutions up to WXGA (1280x800). Other notable peripherals include Ethernet, XSPI (Octal SPI) with XIP and DOTF, SPI, I2C/I3C, SDHI, USBFS/HS, CAN-FD, SSI, 12bit ADC & DAC, comparators, temperature sensor, and timers. The advanced security elements of the series encompass leading-edge cryptographic algorithms, TrustZone, Secure Boot, immutable storage, tamper resistance with DPA/SPA attack protection, secure debug, secure factory programming, and lifecycle management support.

Supported by Renesas’ Flexible Software Package (FSP), the RA8D1 Group MCUs enable faster application development by providing all necessary infrastructure software. This includes multiple RTOS, BSP, peripheral drivers, middleware, connectivity, networking, and security stacks, as well as reference software for complex AI, motor control, and cloud solutions. It allows customers to integrate their own legacy code and choice of RTOS with FSP, thus providing full flexibility in application development and easing migration of existing designs to the new RA8 Series devices.

Further enhancing their market appeal, Renesas has combined the new RA8D1 Group MCUs with numerous compatible devices from its portfolio to offer a wide array of Winning Combinations. These include an Off-road GPS Guidance System and High-efficiency 7KW+ Smart Heat Pump. These Winning Combinations are technically vetted system architectures from mutually compatible devices that work together seamlessly to bring an optimized, low-risk design for faster time to market. Renesas offers more than 400 Winning Combinations with a wide range of products from the Renesas portfolio to enable customers to speed up the design process and bring their products to market more quickly.

The RA8D1 Group MCUs are now available, along with the FSP software. Renesas is also shipping the RA8D1 Evaluation Kit that includes example projects targeted at graphics applications. Various Renesas Ready ecosystem partners also provide production-ready solutions for the RA8D1 MCUs.