Car access has become more convenient as design engineers take advantage of technologies that are widely used in other applications. The automotive industry has evolved from providing mechanical keys to unlock vehicles to fobs with buttons that can unlock vehicles. Now, the most common form of car access revolves around passive entry passive start (PEPS) systems, enabling drivers to enter their car but also start the engine without physically using a key.
Renesas Electronics Corporation introduced the first RA microcontroller (MCU) with an integrated Bluetooth® 5.0 Low Energy radio on 07 May 2020. The single-chip RA4W1 MCU includes a 48 MHz, 32-bit Arm® Cortex®-M4 core and Bluetooth 5.0 core delivered in a 56-pin QFN package. Together, the RA4W1 MCU and easy-to-use Flexible Software Package (FSP) enables engineers to immediately begin development with Arm ecosystem software and hardware building blocks that work out-of-the-box with RA MCUs.
The RA4W1 MCU makes it easy for embedded designers to develop safe and secure IoT endpoint devices for Industry 4.0, building automation, metering, healthcare, consumer wearable, and home appliance applications. The MCU is also ideal for developing IoT edge devices for wireless sensor networks, IoT hubs, an add-on to gateways, and an aggregator to IoT cloud applications.