Renesas Electronics Corporation recently introduced the first RA microcontroller (MCU) with an integrated Bluetooth® 5.0 Low Energy radio. The single-chip RA4W1 MCU includes a 48 MHz, 32-bit Arm® Cortex®-M4 core and Bluetooth 5.0 core delivered in a 56-pin QFN package. Together, the RA4W1 MCU and easy-to-use Flexible Software Package (FSP) enables engineers to immediately begin development with Arm ecosystem software and hardware building blocks that work out-of-the-box with RA MCUs.

The RA4W1 MCU makes it easy for embedded designers to develop safe and secure IoT endpoint devices for Industry 4.0, building automation, metering, healthcare, consumer wearable, and home appliance applications. The MCU is also ideal for developing IoT edge devices for wireless sensor networks, IoT hubs, an add-on to gateways, and an aggregator to IoT cloud applications.

“While offering an MCU with Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity is not new to Renesas, the addition of the RA4W1 enables our customers to easily adopt Bluetooth 5.0,” said Sakae Ito, Vice President of IoT Platform Business Division at Renesas. “Customers can also take full advantage of the on-chip MCU features, including Secure Crypto Engine to implement strong key management for the ultimate IoT security, and best-in-class output power consumption and sensitivity to achieve a superior link budget for longer range applications.”

Key Features of RA4W1 MCU

  • Arm Cortex M4 core and Bluetooth 5.0 core housed in 7mm x 7mm 56-pin QFN
  • Full Bluetooth 5.0 support with industry best power consumption and sensitivity for superior reception
  • Basic protocol stack package and all standard profiles
  • Innovative development environment allows simultaneous development of communication control and system control
  • Reduced BOM through integration
  • The Flexible Software Package’s (FSP) open architecture allows customers to re-use their legacy code and combine it with software examples from Renesas and ecosystem partners

Pricing and Availability

The RA4W1 is available now from Renesas Electronics’ worldwide distributors and is priced at $3.98 USD in 10,000-unit quantities. For more information, please visit: www.renesas.com/products/microcontrollers-microprocessors/ra/ra4/ra4w1.