Renesas Launches Its First RISC-V Chip for On-Device Voice Control at the Edge

Built on a 32-bit AndesCore D25F, the new R9A06G150 ASSP is designed for low power, low cost, and rapid HMI development.

Gareth Halfacree
12 months agoHome Automation / HW101

Renesas has announced its first RISC-V-based microcontroller unit (MCU) to be built specifically with voice-controlled interaction in mind: the R9A06G150 application-specific standard part (ASSP).

"Renesas continues to broaden our RISC-V MCU/MPU [Microcontroller Unit/Microprocessor Unit] offering, in this case by delivering designers an innovative voice-command HMI [Human Machine Interface] with pre-developed software that shortens development time and time to market," claims Renesas' Roger Wendelken of his company's latest launch.

"Through close collaboration with the RISC-V partner ecosystem, this flexible, scalable ASSP solution allows customers interested in voice control to support different application classes on the same MCU hardware platform."

Built on the AndesCore D25F 32-bit implementation of the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA), the R9A06G150's CPU core runs at 100MHz, including floating-point acceleration, and instruction set extensions for digital signal processing (DSP) workloads. There's 128kB of static RAM (SRAM), 16kB of data flash memory, and 256kB of program flash, plus quad-SPI (QSPI) for memory expansion if required.

Designed specifically for voice recognition and control applications at the edge, the new part includes a specialized audio pulse-density modulation (PDM) system and a synchronous serial interface (SSI) for connection to microphones and external audio codecs. The chip is designed to be paired with a more powerful and generalized host processor, with options for UART, SPI, I2C, and I3C communications protocols.

To showcase the part's capabilities, Renesas has released a reference design — or as the company calls it, a "Winning Combination," — for a voice control human-machine interface system based on the R9A06G150 with two READ2302GSP op-amps, a DA7218 I2S codec, two low-dropout (LDO) regulators, and a 16MB QSPI serial flash memory module.

"This pre-programmed solution can input analog and I2S/PDM digital microphone data, actuate digital and analog outputs, and send feedback to an external host via I2C, I3C, UART, and SPI," the company explains. "A QSPI memory interface enables easy memory expansion. Wake-up words and commands can be customized and support multiple languages."

The R9A06G150 is available in the channel now in 24, 32, and 48 lead-count HWQFN packages, with more information published on the Renesas website.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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