Motor controller IC has dual Arm Cortex-R52 and industrial Ethernet

Renesas has revealed MCUs with dual 800MHz Arm Cortex-R52 cores and Ethernet for motor control in ac servo drives, inverters and industrial robots.

“RZ/T2M is capable of controlling the servo motors that drive robots at extremely high speed and with high precision,” said company industrial automation v-p Toshihide Tsuboi. “I anticipate that it will contribute to the development and widespread adoption of sophisticated industrial robots that can work safely alongside humans.”

One of the two cores is dedicated to motor control, the other for networking (see diagram). For low latency, a dedicated bus links motor control peripherals to the motor control CPU, which also has 576kbyte of tightly-coupled error-corrected memory “reducing the fluctuation in execution time that can occur when cache memory is used, and delivering deterministic, fast-response processing” said Renesas.

The comms interface supports EtherCAT, PROFINET RT, EtherNet/IP and PROFINET IRT, and the included Ethernet switch supports the Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) standard.

Although the hardware is designed with functional safety operation in mind, the dual-core processor needs to work with an external MCU to implement functional safety – an RX230 is suggested.

“Later this year Renesas plans to release functional safety solutions, including a SIL3-certified software kit combination that includes a self-test software enabling failure self-diagnosis by the RZ/T2M, and a SIL3 system software for mutual diagnosis and software isolation functionality,” said Renesas. “IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm Functional Safety Edition will support RZ/T2M processors.”

RZ/T2M-RSK (left) is an evaluation board for RZ/T2M, and there is an outline design for a motor controller with Ethernet and RX230 functional safety