Renesas RZ/A2M Microprocessor Wins Electronic Products’ 2018 Product of the Year Award

TOKYO, Japan ― Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE:6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced that the RZ/A2M microprocessor (MPU) with Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor (DRP) technology was selected as a winner of Electronic Products’ prestigious Product of the Year Award in the MPUs and MCUs category. Electronic Products’ editors evaluated more than 100 products launched in 2018 and selected 25 finalists across 10 electronic component categories before naming the winners.

Renesas is expanding its range of embedded artificial intelligence (e-AI) solutions for incorporating AI into embedded systems by bringing intelligence to endpoints. Approximately 150 companies in more than 10 countries worldwide are already conducting trials based on this technology, and there are more than 30 actual e-AI use cases underway.The RZ/A2M MPU is designed for e-AI based imaging in smart appliances, networked cameras, service robots, scanner products, and industrial machinery that require high-speed image processing. It features a unique hybrid approach to image recognition and machine vision by combining proprietary DRP technology for fast pre-processing of image data and feature extraction, closely coupled to an Arm^® Cortex^®-A9 CPU for AI inferencing.

The DRP is based on a massively parallel wired logic architecture that can execute different operations on different data sets at each processor cycle. This allows the RZ/A2M to deliver real-time image processing at low power consumption with complete flexibility, and at 10x the performance of its predecessor, the RZ/A1. RZ/A2M innovation also includes 4 MB of on-chip SRAM, MIPI camera interface, a two-channel Ethernet interface, and hardware security features for crypto acceleration and establishing a Root of Trust.

“We’re proud that Electronic Products magazine recognized the RZ/A2M as the industry’s best MPU with this award,” said Mark Rootz, Senior Director of Industrial Marketing Division, Industrial Solutions Business Unit, Renesas Electronics Corporation. “The rapid adoption of embedded AI drives the need for efficient image processing on the front end of the processor so decisions and actions through AI inference execute quickly on the back end, and sometimes even in parallel. Our DRP technology brings speed, power efficiency, and flexibility to machine vision and image recognition applications, and we are excited to see how the industry uses the RZ/A2M’s capabilities to accelerate the adoption of e-AI.”