Renesas has updated the ‘flexible software package’ (FSP) for its RA family of Arm Cortex-M microcontrollers.

FSP version 1.0 adds security, connectivity, neural network, machine learning and motor control capabilities, as well as improving compiler, debugger, and development environments.

“The security and connectivity enhancements permit developers to quickly create secure IoT endpoint and edge solutions for Industry 4.0, building automation, metering, healthcare, consumer wearable, and home appliance applications,” according to the company. With FSP “customers can re-use their legacy code or combine it with software examples from Renesas.”

FSP comes with FreeRTOS, that can be replaced with other RTOS or middleware, and is open to work with Arm ecosystem third-party solutions.

v1.0 includes middleware stacks to support secure connection to clouds including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and any third party MQTT broker. The new 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.

For 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 and a port output enabled timer to create a predictive maintenance support solution, according to Renesas.

Supported development tools include Renesas e2 studio, Arm Keil MDK and IAR Embedded Workbench® for Arm.

RA family smart configurator enables FSP integration with third party IDEs and compilers.

Support for Renesas E2 emulator and E2 emulator Lite debugging emulators and flash programmers has been added to the current debugging suite, which includes SEGGER J-Link.