Renesas RZ/N2L

The global pandemic accelerates the factory automation such as unmanned and labor saving and increases the investment for robot and the automation for manufacturing equipment. In the automation of such robots and manufacturing equipment, the higher speed and precision control of the motor is required for improving productivity and quality of products. In addition, as automation progresses, it is becoming increasingly important to support high-speed and high-precision synchronization control by Industrial Ethernet and next-generation TSN networks and functional safety. RZ/N2L solves customer’s design problem by.

• Easily connect to existing systems through RZ/N2L parallel host interface and serial host interface to external CPU, without making major changes to the existing systems.
• Providing an Ethernet switch that supports the next-generation network standard TSN. TSN can mix network of control data that require real-time performance, and large-capacity data that does not require real-time performance in one network as well as operating multiple devices in synchronization to reduce wiring in the factory.
• Delivering high-speed and high-precision control through Arm® Cortex®-R52 with a maximum operating frequency 400 MHz and a tightly coupled memory (256KB) that  avoid the fluctuation of execution time in using cache memory and realizes deterministic real-time response. It arranges the peripherals for motor control to LLPP (Low Latency Peripheral Port) directly connected to CPU and realizes to access with low latency.  
• Separating each functional safety and non-functional safety processing in RZ/N2L through its dedicated peripheral functions for functional safety processing. 

Features

• Industrial Ethernet Enabled
  • 3port Gigabit Ethernet switch w/ TSN
  • Supports multi-protocol Industrial Ethernet
• Easy adoption onto existing systems
  • Host I/F supports parallel bus and xSPI(max 8bit) slave
• Implement Industrial Ethernet with a single chip
  • 400MHz High performance real-time CPU, tightly-coupled memory (TCM) with ECC, ADC, ΔΣ interface, PWM timer etc.
• Accelerate Functional Safety development​
  • Renesas offers TUV certified FuSa solution

Benefits

• Enables various industrial systems to easily implement Industrial Ethernet and TSN
• Companion chip
  • Host I/F allows application CPU to directly connection and access at high speed to RZ/N2L. Also, application CPU can directly access to the shared RAM of RZ/N2L.
  • Network protocol stack can be run on RZ/N2L separately from application CPU.
• One Chip
  • Customers can reduce BOM cost compared to typical configuration (application CPU + network ASSP).
• Accelerate FuSa development with lesser effort and cost

Applications

• Industrial automation fields.
  • Communication unit/module for AC servo, Robot, PLC, CNC etc.
  • Remote I/O
  • Sensor Hub
  • Industrial gateway
  • Inverter
  • Sensor equipment