ARM battles RISC-V at Renesas

By Nick Flaherty, eeNews Europe (March 30, 2022)

Renesas Electronics is looking to catch up in the ARM microcontroller and processor markets, but also looking at the emerging RISC-V cores and new spiking AI accelerators to boost machine learning in the Internet of Things (IoT).

At the same time a deal with Arduino aims to drive its chips into many more areas, says Dr. Sailesh Chittipeddi, Executive Vice President and General Manager of IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit of Renesas Electronics talking to eeNews Europe.

“We’ve been doing a lot over the last several years,” said Chittipeddi. “We are primarily strengthening our microcontroller and microprocessor core capabilities which is the heart and soul of the business. We had fallen behind in the ARM ecosystem and we had a strong push to catch up and we have been. We are a long way from being the leader in this market, but the early indicators are good,” he said.

This desire to catch up is reflected by the showing of the first device using the ARM Cortex-M85 core, the highest performance microcontroller core, at Embedded World next month. But with the recent acquisitions of Dialog Semiconductor in the UK and Celeno in Israel the company is adding more wireless capabilities as well as a whole new FPGA business.

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