Japanese electronics giant Renesas has announced functional safety technology for industrial automation, service robotics, medical and smart buildings.

The products meet the IEC 61508 standard for its RA and RX families of microcontrollers. It is offering IEC 61508 SIL3 certified self-test software for Arm Cortex M23 and M33 MCUs. And it has announced the IEC 61508 SIL3 certified Profisafe application software for RX MCUs.

Functional safety is a critical consideration across most industrial automation equipment. It is also becoming increasingly important in numerous other applications, including service robotics, medical and building automation. These requirements are often complex and place additional burden on overall development.

In addition, many users have limited experience with functional safety standards.

Renesas has experts that can help users get to market faster by providing end-to-end support across the range of 32bit MCU families, from concept to commercialisation. It offers training and facilitates and evaluation of software. During development, certified products can help accelerate time to market and reduce cost of ownership. Commercial licensing is available for certified software and technical support is provided throughout the entire product development process.

“Companies of all sizes and in all geographies are seeking help in navigating functional safety requirements,” said Roger Wendelken, senior vice president in Renesas’ IoT and infrastructure business unit. “We are proud to lead the industry in providing certified software that complements our MCUs and assists our customers in getting to market faster.”

Both the self-test software for the RA family and the Profisafe application software for the RX family have been certified by TÜV Rheinland.

Masataka Nakao, general manager responsible for functional safety at TÜV Rheinland in Japan, said: “The diagnostic software added to the Renesas solution, issued by TÜV Rheinland for functional safety certification, is based on the Arm core, which is increasingly being adopted in industrial automation. Verifying diagnostic software takes time, and we are confident that certified Renesas diagnostic software can increase the efficiency of customers’ functional safety product development, which will contribute to the expansion of the functional safety market.”

When building a safety critical system using an MCU, it is required to provide device-level diagnostics. With Renesas’ SIL3 certified self-test software, users can leverage IEC 61508 certifications for the MCU’s CPU, ROM and RAM when certifying the overall system. The self-test software kit supports Arm Cortex M23 and M33 RA2, RA4 and RA6 series MCUs.

Safe network communication is a critical functional safety consideration for applications that use industrial Ethernet. Renesas addresses this with the Profisafe application software, strengthening its safety network offerings. The SIL3-certified software kit realises Profisafe functionalities on Profinet slave devices and eliminates the certification step for network communications. It works with Renesas’ certified SIL3 system software kit for RX MCUs.

The Profisafe application software supports RX200, RX600 and RX700 series MCUs. Self-test software is already available for RX MCUs.