Renesas Electronics Enables Increased Factory Productivity for Industry 4.0

In the era of Industrial IoT (Internet of Things), the industry trend is toward increased connectivity, autonomous and interactive machines, and flexible manufacturing to improve operation and reduce costs. With Industry 4.0, the number of sensor nodes in the factory will increase exponentially, driving the need for more bandwidth in the network in order to move more data and improve analytics. Gigabit-level industrial networks will become the norm, as the current standard industrial network of 100 Mbps will be inadequate for next-generation networks, and transition to a 1 Gigabit standard is under consideration.

The new R-IN32M4-CL2 extends the family of the industry-proven R-IN32M3 platform that incorporates hardware accelerators supporting real-time operating system (RTOS) performance as well as Ethernet packet handling and it improves network performance by up to five times faster than conventional implementations. The new R-IN32M4-CL2 is enhanced with a new ARM® Cortex®-M4 processor with FPU core running at 100 MHz (megahertz), and a single precision Floating Point Unit (FPU) ideal for computationally demanding and complex requirements to support process controllers, gateways, and IO controllers.