Renesas Electronics Corporation announced that its RZ / A2M MPU with Dynamic Reconfigurable Processor (DRP) technology has won the Product of the Year Award for MPU and MCU products in the Electronic Products' annual awards.

Renesas is expanding its line of embedded artificial intelligence (e-AI) solutions to bring AI into embedded systems by providing intelligence to endpoints. About 150 companies in more than 10 countries around the world have begun experimenting with this technology, and more than 30 actual electronic AI use cases are currently underway. The RZ / A2M MPU is designed for e-AI-based smart home imaging, networking, high-speed image processing cameras, service robots, scanner products and industrial machinery. It combines image data and feature extraction with a unique blend of image recognition and machine vision, combined with proprietary DRP technology, and is tightly coupled to the Arm® Cortex®-A9 CPU for AI reasoning.

DRP is based on a massively parallel wired logical architecture that performs different operations on different data sets per processor cycle. This allows the RZ / A2M to provide real-time image processing with low power consumption, with full flexibility and 10 times the performance of its predecessor, the RZ / A1. The RZ / A2M innovation also includes 4 MB of on-chip SRAM, MIPI camera interface, dual-channel Ethernet interface, and hardware security features for cryptographic acceleration and rooting of trust.

“We’re proud that Electronic Products magazine recognized the RZ/A2M as the industry’s best MPU with this award, the rapid adoption of embedded AI drives the need for efficient image processing on the front end of the processor so decisions and actions through AI inference execute quickly on the back end, and sometimes even in parallel. Our DRP technology brings speed, power efficiency, and flexibility to machine vision and image recognition applications, and we are excited to see how the industry uses the RZ/A2M’s capabilities to accelerate the adoption of e-AI.” said Mark Rootz, Senior Director of Industrial Marketing Division, Industrial Solutions Business Unit, Renesas Electronics Corporation.