Last year, my team and I kicked off a series of celebrative campaigns to commemorate Renesas' 32-bit RX MCU family on its 10th Anniversary. Let me take this opportunity to convey my heartfelt thanks to the team and collaborations to make each campaign a great success.
Looking back to when RX was first launched as the successor combining the best of the best MCU DNA resulting from the Hitachi, Mitsubishi, NEC merger; the SuperH, M16/32C, and V850 were star products then, it was really exciting for me to be involved in Renesas China and the challenge of how to introduce RX to the China market/customers. Today, RX powers most leading major inverter home appliances. The RX has developed its own value and continues a steadily growth of customers/fans worldwide.
In the present day, my team and I are tackling the challenges of productizing a growing portfolio of RA Arm® Cortex®-M based MCUs; and more recently undertaking RISC-V ASSP products as our next challenge. The RX remains a cornerstone to Renesas' value as a leading MCU vendor and to the Renesas 32-bit portfolio with the most extensive offering that now includes its third-generation CPU core, the RXv3. The 10th Anniversary campaigns (Wireless Connectivity, Motor Control/FuSa, HMI, Security) highlight the strengths and value that RX will continue to deliver to our customers.
RX is 10 years young now. As I project in my mind where RX will be in the coming year, 2030, and 2040, I see a sparkling bright future. Let me share why. First, RX stands for Renesas Xtreme which symbolized the dynamic and exhibits the great passion of a dedicated team of Renesas folks who are highly committed to delivering RX tremendous competitive promise, helping our customers to find better and differentiated solutions. Although the Arm CPU has played to its market strength, RX has kept on growing a steady stream of ardent customers. Third, the RX roadmap continues to expand; my team and I are now embarking on the next journey to expand RX taking advantage of advanced process nodes for lower power and more integration, and developing new propositions targeting, safety, IoT connectivity and security, and in near future, AI-enabled RX. I also foresee RX will not only remain as a single core but in future multi-core market demands as performance trajectory accelerates.
Today, RX is the workhorse in mostly end-node applications, and tackles performance-hungry applications easily. In the future, the super-smart RX MCU would also entail automatically ensuring secured connectivity to the cloud and be able to man machine-to-machine communication networks sensing with functional safety, delivering high reliability and taking full advantage of embedded AI. I’m excited to see RX shipment forecasts reaching their first billionth pieces milestone soon and to bring the next-generation RX devices and solutions to the market.