Renesas RZ/G3L MPUs Hit 1 mW Standby With Cortex-A55

There is a category of embedded device where the interesting specification is not how fast it runs but how little it draws when it is doing nothing. An EV charger, a factory gateway, a wall-mounted retail terminal — these spend most of their lives asleep, and the standby figure decides the thermal design, the enclosure and sometimes the power budget for the whole installation. Renesas expanded its RZ/G series on September 10-11, 2026 with two parts built around exactly that number.

• RZ/G3L and RZ/G3SE reduce standby power to roughly 1 mW in deep standby while holding the Linux system in memory for fast resume
• Up to four Arm Cortex-A55 application cores at 1.2 GHz, plus a 200 MHz Cortex-M33 real-time coprocessor
• RZ/G3L adds a 600 MHz Mali-G31 GPU and an H.264 codec for 1080p30 encode and decode; RZ/G3SE drops both
• Renesas lists $15.92-$21.65 for the RZ/G3L and $14.28-$20.03 for the RZ/G3SE at 1,000-unit quantities

Why the 1 mW Deep Standby Number Matters

The trick is not simply cutting power — anything can be switched off. It is cutting power while keeping the Linux system resident in memory, so the device resumes quickly rather than cold-booting. A full Linux boot on an application processor takes seconds; a resume from a retained image takes a fraction of that. For a device that has to respond when someone walks up to it, that gap is the difference between feeling broken and feeling instant.

Renesas quotes the 1 mW level for both parts. Supply rails run at 1.0 V for the core, 1.1-1.2 V for memory and 1.8-3.3 V for I/O — conventional numbers that keep board design straightforward.

What Separates the RZ/G3L From the RZ/G3SE?

The two are pin compatible, which is the commercially useful part: one PCB layout serves a product family with and without graphics. The split is clean.

• RZ/G3L carries an Arm Mali-G31 GPU at 600 MHz with Vulkan 1.2, OpenGL ES and OpenCL 2.0 support, plus an H.264 codec handling 1920x1080 at 30 fps in both directions. Renesas targets it at smart retail terminals and medical HMI devices
• RZ/G3SE removes the GPU and video codec and runs two Cortex-A55 cores instead of four, aimed at IoT devices with basic display needs such as EV chargers and industrial gateways

Both include 512 KB of on-chip system RAM with ECC, and support external DDR4-2133 up to 4 GB or LPDDR4-2133 up to 2 GB, also with ECC. Error correction on both the internal and external memory path is a quiet signal about the intended service life — these are parts meant to sit in a cabinet for a decade.

Interfaces Built for Industrial Work

The I/O list reads like a deployment checklist rather than a maker board. Two Gigabit Ethernet ports with TSN support handle deterministic networking on a factory floor. Display output covers MIPI DSI, LVDS and a parallel interface; camera input arrives over MIPI CSI-2. Storage and expansion come from three SD/MMC interfaces, a PCIe Gen2 lane and two USB 2.0 ports, alongside SSIF, SPDIF and PDM audio plus the usual serial buses.

That combination — TSN Ethernet, ECC memory, a real-time M33 core beside the Linux cores — puts these squarely in the same conversation as the Amlogic A123X Cortex-A320 SoCs we covered last week, though Renesas is leaning on power and determinism rather than on-chip AI acceleration. Our low-power wireless MCU guide covers how to think about the standby-versus-throughput trade-off more generally, and the rest of our board coverage lives on the mini computers page.

Dev Kits and Availability

Evaluation kits are available for both parts, each pairing a SMARC v2.1 module with a carrier board and a supported Linux BSP. Partner hardware is coming from Advanet and from Virtium and Embedded Artists, who offer industrial boards and system-on-modules built on the silicon.

One practical caveat: CNX Software notes that distributor stock was still limited shortly after launch, with a 14-week lead time and December 2026 arrival on some channels, and DigiKey prices starting higher than the volume figures at $34.48 for the RZ/G3L and $31.65 for the RZ/G3SE. If you are prototyping now, budget for the evaluation kit rather than loose chips.

Sources: CNX Software — September 11, 2026; Edge AI and Vision Alliance — September 2026.