Industry Expert Blogs

Renesas recently celebrated the launch of our general-purpose, 32-bit RISC-V-based microcontroller – the first commercially available MCU to use the Renesas-developed RISC-V CPU core. The breakthrough expands our MCU leadership by establishing the only MCU portfolio with options based on open-source RISC-V, Arm^® Cortex^®-M, and our own RX CPU cores.

For an excellent technical description of the new 32-bit RISC-V R9A02G021 MCU series, I encourage you to read the "RISC-V Unleashes Your Imagination" blog written by my colleague, Giancarlo Parodi.

Since the March launch, it's struck me that the microcontroller sector is evolving in an exciting direction by providing designers with a growing menu of choices tailored to their performance and power requirements. Unlike the classic 1990s debate between the merits of x86 (CISC) and PowerPC (RISC) CPU architectures, there is plenty of room under the MCU tent for competing – and complementary – processor cores. The common denominator is how best to serve our customers, who increasingly are prioritizing ease of design and the availability of an extensive toolchain network.

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