EtherCAT's application in industrial Ethernet is growing rapidly, with dedicated MCUs, ICs, and high-end system-on-chip (SoC) devices for EtherCAT communications. The new RX72M product group delivers superior performance, with CoreMark scores up to 1396 (Note 1) at EEMBC® benchmarks at 240MHz, enabling simultaneous application processing and EtherCAT communications. This product group combines a motor-controlled MCU with on-chip EtherCAT slave functionality to enable industrial application developers to reduce bill of materials (BOM) and support the miniaturization requirements required for industrial equipment design.

Fu Tianming, vice president of Renesas Electronics Industrial Automation Division, said, "The miniaturization of circuit boards has become increasingly stringent on the board's onboard space and has become a key issue for industrial robot designers. The RX72M product group is the challenge zone. A revolutionary solution. As the world's leading MCU supplier and industrial network solution provider, Renesas is pleased to introduce the RX72M product and share our extensive embedded design expertise. Compared with earlier products, this new product will Reduce board space by approximately 50% while maintaining high performance and support for EtherCAT communications, paving the way for simple and flexible industrial equipment design."

The RX72M product group is the first RX series MCU to include an EtherCAT slave controller with the highest SRAM capacity in the RX family - 1 MB SRAM and 4 MB flash. High-capacity SRAM allows MCUs to run multiple middleware systems at high speed without the use of external storage, such as TCP/IP, web servers, and file systems. It also provides the flexibility to support future expansion of functions, such as the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA, Note 2) standard, without additional memory. The on-chip flash memory can also operate independently as two 2MB flash memories, enabling the terminal device to run stably; for example, when executing a program in one flash memory, it can be rewritten in the background in another flash memory.

Key features of the RX72M product group:

The first integrated EtherCAT slave controller in the RX series MCU

Supports industrial Ethernet communication up to 1396 CoreMark scores at 240MHz operation, the first RX Series MCU with integrated double precision floating point unit (FPU)

High-speed flash memory system that supports speeds up to 120 MHz for high performance and low variability operating environments

Special trigonometric functions (sin, cos, arctan, and hypot) accelerator and register bank save functions for high-precision motor control—the same functions as the Renesas RX72T motor control MCU

Reliable encryption mechanisms such as hardware encryption modules and memory protection for protecting keys - prevent application systems from being copied without authorization and support authentication of real devices

Flexible package options, including 176-pin LQFP package and 176-pin BGA package, and the first 224-pin BGA package in the RX family of MCUs, saving additional space for size-constrained designs