Renesas R8P1 - A 1 GHz Arm Cortex-M85 microcontroller with Ethos-U55 NPU for Audio and Vision AI applications

Renesas has introduced its most powerful Cortex-A85 microcontroller to date: the R8P1, clocked at 1 GHz and equipped with a 500 MHz Arm Ethos-U55 NPU for edge AI applications, as well as an Arm Cortex-M33 real-time core clocked at 250 MHz.

With a 2D GPU, MIPI DSI and parallel RGB display interfaces, MIPI CSI and parallel camera interfaces, and I2S and PDM audio interface, the Renesas RA8P1 is mainly designed to address Voice AI and Vision AI applications requiring real-time analytics. The 1 GHz microcontroller also has plenty of other peripherals and security features, as we can see from the specifications and block diagram below.

Renesas RA8P1 specifications:

MCU core
- Arm Cortex-M85 clocked at 1 GHz with Helium MVE (M-Profile Vector Extension) with 32KB I/D caches; 7300+ CoreMarks
- Arm Cortex-M33 clocked at 250 MHz with 32KB I/D caches
GPU – 2D drawing engine
NPU – Arm Ethos-U55 NPU delivering 256 GOPS at 500 MHz
Memory & Storage
- 2 MB SRAM
  - 1.6 MB data SRAM with ECC
  - 256MB TCM for Cortex-A85, 128MB TCM for Cortex-M33
- 0.5/1MB MRAM
- Optional 4MB or 8MB flash memory for SiP products
- 2x xSPI compliant octal SPI with XIP (eXecute In Place) up to 333 MB/s
- 2x SDHI/MMC
- 16-bit/32-bit external memory bus
Display interfaces
- Graphics LCD Controller (GLCDC) with parallel RGB
- MIPI DSI
Camera interfaces
- 2-lane MIPI-CSI2 camera interface up to 720 Mbps per lane
- 16-bit CEU parallel camera interface up to 5 MP
Audio
- 2x SSIE (Serial Sound Interface Enhanced) with I2S/Monoaural/TDM audio data support
- 3x PDM for microphone array
Communication peripherals
- Networking – 2x Gigabit Ethernet MACs (GMAC) with TSN support and 2-port switch
- USB – USB 2.0 High-Speed and Full Speed interfaces
- 2x CAN-FD
- Up to 10x SCI (UART, Simple SPI, Simple I2C) up to 60 Mbps
- 3x I2C, 1x I3C
- 2x SPI up to 166 Mbps
Analog
- 2x 12-bit ADC up to 23 channels
- 2x 12-bit DAC
- 4-channel high-speed analog comparators
- Temperature sensor
System
- Low power modes
- Battery backup function (VBAT)
- Event Link Controller (ELC)
- 2x Data Transfer Controllers (DTC)
- 2x 8-channel DMA Controllers (DMAC)
- Power-on reset
- Programmable Voltage Detection (PVD) with voltage settings
Timers
- 4x 32-bit high-resolution timers
- 10x 32-bit PWM timers
- 2x low-power asynchronous general-purpose timers
- 2x 32-bit ultra-low-power timers
- 2x Watchdog timers
- RTC
Security
- ARMv8-M TrustZone Security
- Renesas Secure IP (RSIP-E51A)
- AES-128/192/256, CHACHA20, RSA4K, ECC
- SHA-2 (224/256/384/512), SHA-3
- On-chip immutable ROM for First Stage Bootloader with hardware Root-of-Trust
- OTP (immutable storage)
- Octal SPI with Decryption-on-the-fly (DOTF)
- CMAC/HMAC/GMAC
- Secure authenticated debug
- Tamper protection with DPA/SPA side channel protection
Supply Voltage
- MCU (without flash) – 1.62 to 3.63V for VCC/VCC2
- SiP – VCC: 1.62 to 3.63V; VCC2: 1.7 to 2V
Packages – 224-pin (BGA224 11×11 mm), 289-pin (BGA289 12×12 mm), and 303-pin (BGA303 15×15 mm) packages
Temperature Range – 0 to 95°C or -40 to 105°C
Manufacturing process – TSMC 22nm ultra-low leakage

Like other Renesas RA series microcontrollers, the RA8P1 Cortex-A85 microcontroller is supported by the e²Studio IDE, the Flexible Software Package (FSP) with FreeRTOS, Azure RTOS and Zephyr OS, software example projects, and various development tools. The company has also introduced the RUHMI (Renesas Unified Heterogeneous Model Integration) framework, designed for AI deployment on MCUs and MPUs. RUHMI provides native support for machine-learning AI frameworks such as TensorFlow Lite, Pytorch & ONNX, all necessary tools, APIs, code generator, and runtime needed.

Renesas also provides the EK-RA8P1 evaluation kit with an R7KA8P1KFLCAC MCU (BGA289) coupled with 64MB SDRAM and 64GB OSPI flash, and offering Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port and access to I/Os through standard headers and connectors, namely mikroBUS headers, SparkFun Qwiic connector (not populated), two Grove (I2C and Analog) connectors (not populated), two Pmod (SPI/UART/I2C) connectors, and Arduino Uno R3 headers. The kit ships with a 7.0-inch, 1024×600 parallel LCD board and a 5MP camera module, as well as preloaded demonstrations that showcase the RA8P1 capabilities out of the box.

As usual, Renesas also released “Winning Combinations” reference designs for the Renesas RA8P1 MCU. Three combinations are available: a video conferencing camera with AI capabilities, an AI drawing robot arm, and an AI-enabled surveillance camera, all of which you can find on Renesas’ Applications page. Third-party solutions leveraging the RA8P1 are also available from a range of partners, including a driver monitoring solution from Nota.AI and a traffic/pedestrian monitoring solution from Irida Labs.

1 GHz microcontrollers are not exactly commonplace. NXP introduced the i.MX RT1170 Arm Cortex-M7/M4 MCU clocked at 1 GHz back in 2019. Since then, we’ve only seen another one with the HPMicro HPM64G0 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller achieving over 5600 CoreMark. This probably means the Renesas RA8P1 is the world’s most powerful microcontroller as things stand now.

The Renesas RA8P1 microcontrollers are available now (except the 303-pin parts apparently) with the price starting at $28.17 for samples. I could not find volume pricing, but Mouser sells one of the SKUs for $20.34 per piece for 100-unit orders. The EK-RA8P1 evaluation kit can be purchased on Mouser for $195.98 with all accessories. More details, including documentation and development tools, may be found on the product page and in the press release.

Thanks to TLS for the tip.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.