Renesas Electronics’ RX72T Group of 32-bit motor control microcontrollers (MCUs) with dedicated hardware accelerator IP perform complex, high-speed computations required for motor control in robots and other industrial equipment. The components achieve an 1160 CoreMark score as measured by EEMBC Benchmarks, reportedly the highest level for a 5V MCU operating at 200 MHz.
The RX72T MCUs include dedicated accelerator hardware that enables the high-speed position control and speed control calculations required for implementing servo motor control in compact industrial robots. This allows the current control loop calculation to be performed in less than 1.5 µs.
Implementing calculations in software can require excessive computing time. However, completely hardware-based calculations can adversely affect the flexibility to implement unique user control operations. With the RX72T MCUs, Renesas resolves the issue by implementing only the single-precision floating point trigonometric function (sin, cos, arctan, hypot) and a register bank save function in hardware as dedicated IP. This retains the flexibility while increasing the calculation speed. Furthermore, the register bank save function increases the speed and precision of interrupt handling, improving the device computation performance. The MCUs also include 200 MHz PWM inverter control timers with up to 4 channels of 3-phase control, 2 channels of 5-phase control or 10 channels of single-phase control.
The MCUs will be available in mass production quantities beginning in Q4 2019. The 512 KB flash, 100-pin R5F572TFBDFP device will be priced at $4.06 each/10,000. To glean more, checkout the RX72T MCU datasheet.