The Renesas RZ has multiple SPI ports, which Teensy 3.2 doesn’t have (but PIC does).

This post is intended simply as a DIY-friendly introduction to the Renesas RZ so that you can assess its suitability for your project, and have some pointers should you decide to begin developing with it. They are extremely complicated things to use, and developers will need to know (or learn) how to do things like design their own PCBs (see below), read and understand MCU datasheets, tweak linker scripts, and unless your luck is significantly better than mine, probably troubleshoot seemingly unexplainable problems for days at a time. The purpose of this post is not to provide a step-by-step guide to using Renesas RZ microcontrollers.

Nowhere could I find any hint of an MCU more powerful than the PIC32MZ with a more active user community than the Renesas RZ’s very small one. However, if you’re used to the friendly documentation and active online user communities around Teensy, Arduino and PIC development, you’re not going to find Renesas easy: all there is is a 2,500 page datasheet, a few example projects, and the RZ forum only gets about 3 posts per week. The same GCC optimisation settings were used.) (That’s with virtually the exact same codebase – I’d bypassed the Teensy audio library and am writing generated audio data straight to a DMA-read output buffer in both cases. My own synthesizer engine, which crunches 32-bit integers, runs 4.2x faster on the Renesas RZ than Teensy 3.2 / 3.1. Its specs are an enormous upgrade from Teensy and PIC. It runs at 400MHz (and has 3 times the DMIPS of the top PIC32MZ), and has between 3MB and 10MB of onboard RAM, depending on the model, and allows you to connect up to 128MB of external SDRAM.

The option I went with, and spent several difficult months learning how to use, is the Renesas RZ. For an advanced piece of music hardware I’m developing, I needed something with as much processing power and RAM as possible. (The top PIC32MZ does have many known errata, for which users are anxiously awaiting an updated version.)īut where to if you need even more power than that? That’s the question that I came up against a few months ago, and nowhere on the Internet had a definitive answer. Not quite as easy to use as Teensy / Arduino, but still manageable, and with a large user community who can help you out. If you need something a bit more powerful (and with quite a bit more RAM than the Teensy 3.2’s 64KB), there’s PIC – their top MCUs (PIC32MZ) run at 200MHz, with 512KB RAM. A Teensy 3.2, for instance, runs at 96MHz and can easily process and output CD-quality audio (through its Audio Adapter Board), and the relatively small amount of coding you need to do is well documented and easy. DIY hardware developers today are spoilt by the ease with which they can create processor-intensive hardware with very little prior knowledge.

Spi programmer with teensy