Japanese electronics company Renesas has updated its FSP flexible software package for the RA family of 32bit Arm Cortex-M microcontrollers (MCUs) so developers can quickly create secure IoT endpoint and edge products for Industry 4.0, building automation, metering, healthcare, consumer wearable and home appliance applications.
 
The FSP version 1.0 adds security and connectivity features, neural network, machine learning and motor control capabilities, as well as enhanced compiler, debugger and development environments.
 
FSP is for users that want a flexible and open architecture. They can re-use their legacy code or combine it with software examples from Renesas that help speed implementation of complex connectivity and security features.
 
The FSP comes with Free RTOS and can be replaced with any other RTOS or middleware to meet each user’s requirements. The combination of FSP and Arm ecosystem third-party products provides a wide range of user choices. They can choose the software model that best suits their needs while using Renesas’ line of RA 32bit MCUs.
 
FSP v1.0 offers security and connectivity features that enable complete chip-to-cloud connections. The publicly available source code includes middleware stacks to support secure connections with all major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and any third party MQTT broker.
 
Added security features include secure key generation and persistent encrypted key storage, hardware acceleration for AES, SHA-2, RSA 2K, Nist and Brainpool elliptic curve cryptography, as well as secured MQTT connections over TLS.
 
FSP v1.0 also includes neural network, machine learning and motor control support. Arm CMSIS-NN libraries are available and can be combined with motor control features such as a three-phase general-purpose PWM timer (GPT) and a port output enabled GPT to create predictive maintenance support.
 
Development tools, including compilers and integrated development environments (IDEs), have also been updated and now support Renesas e² studio, Arm Keil MDK and IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm. The RA family smart configurator enables seamless FSP integration with third party IDEs and compilers. Support for Renesas E2 and E2 Lite emulator debugging emulators and flash programmers has been added to the debugging suite, which includes Segger J-Link.