Renesas has added a new low-end member to its RH850 automotive MCU family with the 28 nm RH850/U2C, aimed at chassis and safety systems, battery management systems, lighting, motor control and other ASIL D applications.
The 32-bit MCU combines four RH850 CPU cores running at up to 320 MHz—including two lockstep cores—and up to 8 MB of on-chip flash. Renesas says it is designed as a migration path for developers using RH850/P1x or RH850/F1x devices, helping them move toward newer vehicle E/E architectures.
A big part of the pitch is communications support. The RH850/U2C includes interfaces for Ethernet 10BASE-T1S, Ethernet TSN at 1 Gbps/100 Mbps, CAN-XL and I3C, while maintaining compatibility with more familiar automotive interfaces such as CAN-FD, LIN, UART, CXPI, I²C, I²S and PSI5. Renesas says that mix should ease phased migration toward domain- and zone-based architectures.
The company also emphasizes functional safety up to ASIL D, ISO 26262 compliance and support for ISO/SAE 21434 cybersecurity requirements, along with hardware accelerators for cryptographic processing. “The RH850/U2C combines performance, a rich feature set and compliance with key industry standards to meet the requirements of next-generation ECUs,” said Renesas VP Satoshi Yoshida.
Source: Renesas
