Renesas Electronics intros low-power industrial Ethernet communication chips with integrated real-time OS offload engine

JAPAN: Renesas Electronics Corp. announced the R-IN32M3 series of industrial Ethernet communication chips with support for multiple communication protocols in response to the rapid adoption of industrial Ethernet communication technology.

One of the most distinctive features of the R-IN32M3 is the high-speed operation with the basic function of the real-time OS in hardware to implement high-speed real-time response and high-precision communication control for industrial Ethernet communication.

Because the hardware in the new R-IN32M3 series covers heavy load operations for the CPU, the combination of the CPU and integrated real-time OS off load engine (HW-RTOS) result in ultra-high-speed real-time responsiveness five to ten times that of a conventional software real-time OS.

In addition, the fluctuation caused by inconsistencies in the operation time with conventional CPU processing is reduced substantially from one-fifth to one-tenth of the previous level. The new R-IN32M3 series include an integrated ARM Cortex-M3 CPU (100 MHz). The new Ethernet controllers accept protocols for industrial Ethernet communication
such as CC-Link IE and EtherCAT and will accept the control area network (CAN), which is heavily used in industries and generic interface such as universal asynchronous receiver transmitter (UART).

There are also plans to provide support for the SSCNET III/H optical network standard, which uses fully synchronous communication to deliver improved performance