Renesas Targets Robotics and Industrial Equipment with Its New RZ/T2N Quad-Core Chip

Renesas has announced another new entry in its RZ family, this time designed with robotics and industrial equipment firmly in mind: the RZ/T2N, an application-class microprocessor with motor control and industrial Ethernet on-board.

"Industrial equipment designers must balance competing requirements: functionality and performance on one hand, footprint and cost on the other," says Renesas' Hari Pendurty in support of the company's latest launch. "The RZ/T2N solves this challenge by consolidating the essential functions onto a single chip. Combined with our scalable product portfolio, the RZ/T2N gives customers the flexibility to scale their designs for next-generation industrial automation."

The RZ/T2N is built around two processor clusters: a dual-core Arm Cortex-A55 cluster running at up to 1,200MHz plus a dual-core Cortex-R52 real-time cluster running at up to 800MHz. There's 576kB of tightly-coupled memory (TCM) per Cortex-R52 core plus 2MB of on-chip static RAM (SRAM), both with error correction code (ECC) support, with an LPDDR4 interface for external memory. The on-board motor controller offers up to four-axis control, while there's a trio of 12-bit analog to digital converters (ADCs) on board plus a 15-channel delta-sigma intermediate-frequency (IF) interface.

Other features of the chip include an eight-channel motor encoder interface supporting two channels per axis in Tamagawa T-Format, HIPERFACE DSL, A-format, EnDat 2.2, BiSS C, EnDat 3, BiSS Line protocols, a trio of gigabit Ethernet MACs with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) support, on-board Ethernet switch, and an EtherCAT Sub-Device Controller (ESC) for industrial Ethernet connectivity, PROFINET RT/IRT and EtherNet/IP support, four SPI, three I2C, 14 SCI, and two CAN-FD buses, on-board security block with true random number generator (TRNG), and a hardware accelerator for trigonometric functions.

More information on the RZ/T2N is available on the Renesas website; an evaluation board is available to order at $549, but the chips themselves had not yet appeared in the sales channel at the time of writing.