Have you ever thought about the enhancement journey of the display equipment that you are experiencing today? In recent years, there have been many advertising monitors on commuter trains, self-payment equipment at convenience stores, digital menu selections in restaurants, and cooking equipment at home. In the world of embedded human machine interface (HMI) applications, small displays are commonplace, but recently, there has been an increase in relatively large-scale embedded display devices of 10 inches or more. For display devices of this size, a resolution of the Full-HD (1920x1080 pixels) class is preferred so that the image does not look grainy. In addition to resolution, these displays have become more sophisticated and common to connect to the Internet. Furthermore, in recent years, there has been a growing need for AI-based intelligence, enabling the devices to recognize users and support data collection and analysis. Despite such high functionality, eco-products with low power consumption are also desired due to environmental conservation and rising resource prices. Renesas' RZ/G3E microprocessor (MPU) is designed to solve many of these challenges.
Enable Smooth Drawing and Control at High Resolutions
The performance of an MPU is critical for smooth drawing, as it directly impacts the speed and efficiency of graphic displays. Faster MPU processing allows more complex images to display in real-time, enhancing the overall user experience. The RZ/G3E's quad-core Arm® Cortex®-A55 CPU runs at 1.8GHz and is an extremely powerful CPU that performs not only HMI applications and various Linux operations, but also processing applications related to edge computing. Its arithmetic processing performance is 3.4 times higher than that of the current mid-class RZ/G2E MPU in the second generation of RZ/G series, and is close to that of the high-class RZ/G2M MPU. The RZ/G3E MPU offers excellent cost performance to the users.
In addition to the high-performance CPU, RZ/G3E has integrated the 3D GPU Arm Mali-G52 (equivalent to 30GFlops) and H.264/265 video codec that strongly support HMI functions. Furthermore, two channels of the LCD controller are built into RZ/G3E to simultaneously output two screens in Full-HD size and independently control both screens. The output interface is also equipped with sufficient functions such as dual-link LVDS, 4-lane MIPI-DSI, and parallel digital RGB. These excellent HMI features deliver smooth graphics even on large screens.
Indispensable High-Speed Communication in Edge Devices
In today's IoT era, many devices are connected to the internet, and high-speed communication functions are indispensable even for display devices. RZ/G3E supports PCIe Gen3 (8Gbps) and USB 3.2 Gen2 (10Gbps) with dramatically improved communication speed from the existing RZ/G products to meet these market needs. With built-in high-speed connectivity interfaces such as PCIe Gen3, USB 3.2 Gen2, and Gigabit Ethernet, the RZ/G3E enables 5G communication with the cloud.
Arm Ethos™-U55 NPU Accelerates Intelligence
In the age where artificial intelligence (AI) prevails, there is even a need for embedded devices to have intelligence and provide high value-add to users. This is because if all AI processing needs to be done on the cloud, data communication would require significant Internet network traffic. RZ/G3E has equipped Arm Ethos-U55 as a neural processing unit (NPU) dedicated processor for AI inference with 512GOPS performance at 1.0GHz operation, offering vision AI for object detection, face recognition, and people counting, as well as voice AI and sensing AI. Another advantage of the Ethos-U55 is that it can offload AI processing from the main CPU, allowing users to build more power-efficient systems.
The Ethos-U55 is also embedded in Renesas' RA8P1 MCU, enabling users to select from Renesas' scalable AI portfolio. The RA8P1 is an excellent AI-accelerated MCU to easily execute lightweight AI at high speed with the built-in NPU and SRAM. On the other hand, the RZ/G3E MPU has the advantage of handling larger AI models at higher speed with external high-speed DRAM. For users who need much higher AI performance, explore our RZ/V series MPUs. With Renesas' scalable AI portfolio, you can choose the ideal product for your development according to the AI model size or AI processing performance required for your development.
Overcoming Linux-based Products' Challenges in Fast Recovery from the Deep Standby Mode
As typical HMI products do not operate continuously at full power for 24 hours in 365 days, reducing standby power consumption when not in use is especially important. For smaller display devices, RTOS-based MCUs are often used, and the short start-up time from power-off status allows the power to be turned off when not in use. However, it is hard to develop application programs using RTOS for large display devices with higher functions in general. Hence, Linux-based application programs tend to be adopted for those devices. The program size of Linux is basically much larger than the RTOS program, causing it to take more than 10 seconds to start up the system from a power-off status in some cases. To solve this issue, RZ/G3E implements a partial power shut-off function, which can significantly reduce power consumption by keeping the minimum power supply required to hold data in DRAM memory and turn off the power supply in other areas. In this deep standby feature called DDR retention mode, the Linux programs in DRAM memory do not disappear, so there is no need to reload Linux programs from external nonvolatile memory, which significantly reduces the time to return from standby status. Also, since the power consumption is reduced to a minimum supply, the standby power of the MPU can be achieved with a very low standby power of around 1mW.
For large-scale display devices that are frequently used in our daily lives and have become more sophisticated, Renesas' RZ/G3E MPU is designed to meet market needs by providing better intelligence and lower power consumption, and making our lives easier.
Visit www.renesas.com/rzg3e for more information.