Various Motor Control Development Support Tools for the RX24T and RX23T Available
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — March 23, 2016 — Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today expanded its robust lineup of 32-bit microcontrollers (MCUs) with the RX24T Group. Using the RXv2 CPU core, the new MCUs deliver double the performance from the RX23T, 30 percent reduced development time, and features additional instructions designed to accelerate performance and energy efficiency in industrial equipment, office equipment, and household appliances.
The new product lineup comprises a total of six new devices with pin counts from 80- to 100-pin and on-chip flash memory capacities from 128 kilobytes (KB) to 256 KB. The RX24T Group enables simultaneous inverter control of multiple motors with a single chip and are ideally suited for permanent magnet AC (PMAC) motor1 control in a variety of applications.
The RX24T Group offers up to 160 DMIPs, including dedicated analog functions to optimize the inverters Bill of Material (BoM) and furthermore increases the arithmetic operation and expands the motor-control peripheral functions of the cost-optimized RX23T.
In addition, Renesas plans to deliver a 24 V motor control evaluation kit2, that can support both the single-motor control RX23T and the multi-motor control RX24T.
Recently many countries have imposed legal requirements mandating improved motor efficiency3, in addition to regulations intended to reduce energy consumption. This has increased demand for highly efficient inverter control.
However, this has also created numerous concerns for system manufacturers who want to quickly release products for this new market but who lack the necessary development workforce and motor control expertise. In addition, many types of equipment are becoming more compact, reducing the amount of space available for printed circuit boards. Finding ways to reduce the number of components in order to integrate multiple boards and reduce their number has therefore become a major issue.
In response to this demand for better energy efficiency, higher-precision control, reduced board size, and shorter development time, Renesas has developed the RX24T Group, a high-speed, high-functionality 32-bit Group of MCUs that enables control of multiple motors with a single chip.
Key features of the new RX24T Group of MCUs:
(1) With on-chip FPU functionality for faster code execution, RX24T supports high-performance multi-motor control for development of platforms with a broad range of products
The RX24T incorporates the RXv2 CPU core with a five-stage pipeline, a floating point unit (FPU4) and DSP functions, executing 32-bit multiply within a single instruction to improve algorithm calculation accuracy. Effectively, the RX24T running at 80 MHz has similar performance levels of a comparable 100MHz MCU. The on-chip FPU functionality provides faster implementation of calculation-intensive algorithms with wide dynamic range.
The FPU enables the overall code to be reduced, and overall software implementations are executed much faster as no scaling or saturation occurred. It offers a higher accuracy than the integer implementation as the real physical units are used in the embedded software.
In addition, the FPU guarantees a faster computation time for PI controllers and estimators. The FPU simplifies debugging and can reduce development time by approximately 30 percent while reducing the rate of software glitches.
In addition, the RX24T Group of MCUs maintains excellent compatibility with the RX23T Group, allowing reuse of existing hardware and software assets, boosts CPU performance from 40 MHz to 80 MHz and Flash capacity from 128 KB to 256 KB, and doubles the power of the on-chip motor control–related peripheral functions (timers, A/D converters, and operational amplifiers) to enable control of multiple Permanent Magnet AC motors using a single chip.
The RX24T also integrates fail-safe mechanisms in hardware enabling fast implementation and execution of Class B Self-Test routines, mandatory for the IEC60730-1 safety compliance.
(2) Renesas’ flexible motor control development solution and tools allow one-day evaluation of sensorless vector control
Developing new motor-enabled systems for a rapidly growing market demands short application development cycles and specialized expertise. Renesas has developed a flexible 24 V motor control evaluation kit (Note 2) for use with the RX23T and RX24T. It enables developers to start evaluating motor control applications quickly, allowing development work to get underway with less effort. The kit includes a CPU card, a low-voltage inverter, a PMAC motor with sensorless vector control driver software5, and sample demos.
The kit also includes an in-circuit scope (ICS), a RAM variable waveform
display tool that is indispensable in reducing the development workload,
provides safe debugging and substantially shortens the time needed for
evaluation. An intuitive auto tuning tool lets users tune their own
motor in less than a minute, significantly simplifying development and
eliminating typical trial-and-error methods. Software and evaluation
tools include support for CS+ and e2 studio integrated development
environments, a code generation support tool, C compilers, debuggers,
and flash memory programmers.
