More than 10 years of RX microcontrollers in the market. It was only possible to achieve this together with many satisfied customers which share a long history and relationship with Renesas and even its predecessors. Some of them played a rather outstanding role in terms of the development of new products with specific features. This is most interesting when it comes to application specific devices such as microcontrollers for motor control usage. Processing power, analog features, software and algorithm support, robustness, and many other characteristics must be fine tuned to the exact right balance to meet the desired performance and price ratio.
At Renesas, we are always especially focused on long-term relationships. And all our team members are an essential part of building that needed trust as a foundation of these relationships. That is not only trust in the quality of our products but also in the executing people. At the forefront of course there is sales and application engineering to support our customers on daily basis. Then it is crucial to let the customer speak, and we must listen carefully. That is most important when defining new products based on real customer needs. Product marketing and finally our development forces have the responsibility to make the right decisions on technical details and feature set to close the loopback to customer satisfaction. After years and several iterations of great and successful products which met customer needs, Renesas really managed to build very deep and emotional customer relationships.
One of these very personal and trustful relationships motivated us to develop a new motor control specific RX microcontroller based on specific customer requirements with the target to create a low cost yet highly integrated solution to drive lower-end motors with limited dynamics.
Nevertheless, to efficiently drive permanent magnet synchronous machines (PMSM) or brushless DC motors (BLDC) field-oriented control also known as vector control is mandatory. To achieve satisfying control loop cycle times when using lower performance microcontrollers requires some smart measures to be implemented. These are regarding the analog signal chain but also memory and core performance.
The analog-to-digital converter unit with its three channel-dedicated sample and hold units with integrated programmable gain amplifiers (PGA) enable simultaneous sampling of the three motor phase currents.
While being operated at just 32MHz the RXv1 core gets boosted by the integrated floating-point unit when calculating the vector control algorithm. As well clocked by the 32MHz internal high-speed oscillator with 1% accuracy is the flash memory which means that not a single wait cycle is needed to access the memory. This RX-typical performance architecture leads to best-in-class benchmarking values. The product which was described here is of course our RX13T from the RX microcontroller family that achieves a CoreMark score of 3.37CoreMark/MHz. This is just but only completed by the great noise immunity due to its 5V supply voltage capabilities.
With RX13T, Renesas actually achieved something greater than just the development of a highly integrated and cost-effective motor-control device. By following our customer-centric attitudes, we were able to lift customer relationships to another level. With acceptance and appreciation on both sides, and after many rounds of constructive discussions and fair negotiations, we achieved a win/win/win situation. Win for the particular customer by participation to a specific requirement-driven microcontroller development. The requirements have also been enhanced to fit to major market needs which finally enriched Renesas’ RX product portfolio.
This success along with the 10 years history of RX MCUs was only possible through our valued customers.
And we simply want to say thank you for being the most important part of this exciting journey!
P.S. Unfortunately, due to the sensitiveness of our customer’s business nature and her competition, we are unable to review the customer’s name here. Without doubt, this blog is dedicated to you in acknowledgment of our success together over the last 10 years and you know who we are referring to.
Learn more about Renesas RX 32-bit MCUs.
Learn more about the RX13T MCU for single motor control.