RA6M3 Evaluation Kit

Overview

The Renesas RA6M3 group uses the high-performance Arm® Cortex®-M4 core and offers a TFT controller with 2D accelerator and JPEG decoder. The RA6M3 is suitable for IoT applications requiring TFT, Ethernet, security, large embedded RAM, and USB High Speed (HS).

The key features of the EK-RA6M3 board are categorized in three groups as follow:

MCU Native Pin Access

  • 120MHz Arm Cortex-M4 based RA6M3 MCU in 176 pins, LQFP package

  • Native pin access through 4 x 40-pin male headers

  • MCU and USB current measurement points for precision current consumption measurement

  • Multiple clock sources - RA6M3 MCU oscillator and sub-clock oscillator crystals, providing precision 24.000 MHz and 32,768 Hz reference clock. Additional low precision clocks are avaialbe internal to the RA6M3 MCU

System Control and Ecosystem Access

  • USB Full Speed Host and Device (micro AB connector)

  • Four 5V input sources

    • USB (Debug, Full Speed, High Speed)

    • External power supply (using surface mount clamp test points and power input vias)

  • Three Debug modes

    • Debug on-board (SWD)

    • Debug in (ETM, SWD and JTAG)

    • Debug out (SWD)

  • User LEDs and buttons

    • Three User LEDs (red, blue, green)

    • Power LED (white) indicating availability of regulated power

    • Debug LED (yellow) indicating the debug connection

    • Two User buttons

    • One Reset button

  • Four most popular ecosystems expansions

    • Two Seeed Grove system (I2C) connectors

    • Two Digilent Pmod (SPI and UART) connectors

    • Arduino (Uno R3) connector

    • MikroElektronika mikroBUS connector

  • MCU boot configuration jumper

Special Feature Access

  • Ethernet (RJ45 RMII interface)

  • USB High Speed Host and Device (micro-AB connector)

  • 32 Mb (256 Mb) External Quad-SPI Flash

RA6M3 Evaluation Kit

EK-RA6M3 Board Functional Area Definitions (Credit: Renesas Electronics Corporation)

Hardware

Detailed hardware feature for the RA6M3 MCU group can be found at RA6M3 Group User’s Manual Hardware

RA6M3 MCU group feature

RA6M3 Block diagram (Credit: Renesas Electronics Corporation)

Detail hardware feature for the EK-RA6M3 MCU can be found at EK-RA6M3 - User’s Manual

Supported Features

The below features are currently supported on Zephyr OS for EK-RA6M3 board:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

MPU

on-chip

arch/arm

NVIC

on-chip

arch/arm

UART

on-chip

serial

CLOCK

on-chip

clock control

I2C

on-chip

i2c

Other hardware features are currently not supported by the port.

Programming and Debugging

Applications for the ek_ra6m3 board target configuration can be built, flashed, and debugged in the usual way. See Building an Application and Run an Application for more details on building and running.

Flashing

Program can be flashed to EK-RA6M3 via the on-board SEGGER J-Link debugger. SEGGER J-link’s drivers are avaialbe at https://www.segger.com/downloads/jlink/

To flash the program to board

  1. Connect to J-Link OB via USB port to host PC

  2. Make sure J-Link OB jumper is in default configuration as describe in EK-RA6M3 - User’s Manual

  3. Execute west command

    west flash -r jlink

Debugging

You can use Segger Ozone (Segger Ozone Download) for a visual debug interface

Once downloaded and installed, open Segger Ozone and configure the debug project like so:

  • Target Device: R7FA6M3AH

  • Target Interface: SWD

  • Target Interface Speed: 4 MHz

  • Host Interface: USB

  • Program File: <path/to/your/build/zephyr.elf>

Note: It’s verified that we can debug OK on Segger Ozone v3.30d so please use this or later version of Segger Ozone

References