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Renesas Technology Introduces Industry’s First Interactive Software and Hardware Demonstration Platforms, the “Sub-Atomic Particle Boards” for Microcontrollers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Renesas Technology America, Inc. today announced three innovative “Sub-Atomic Particle Board” (SPB) demonstration platforms, for the M16C, R8C and H8 microcontroller (MCU) product families. The new platforms are designed to ease and accelerate the assessment of the on-chip peripheral functions and system development tools of MCUs by offering a truly integrated suite of hardware and software.

The capabilities of the SPB demonstration platforms will dramatically change the way engineers interact with an evaluation of MCUs and tools. Traditional evaluation boards often require engineers to spend a tremendous amount of time learning and understanding complex software and then fine-tuning its interaction with the hardware. By contrast, the new platforms save time and money, simplifying this process by providing a fully working combination of software and hardware, supplemented by interactive tutorials that quickly and easily guide users through necessary setup procedures and learning scenarios.

“Typically, the amount of time our customers spend on developing software exceeds 75 percent of the project’s total. This is significant,” said Jeff Waldman, distribution marketing manager and SPB project manager, Renesas Technology America, Inc. “With the new demonstration platforms, we ultimately aim to bridge the gap between traditional basic evaluation boards and full-scale development boards by offering advanced software assessment capabilities that were not achievable with the limited functionality of evaluation boards. Also, the unified user interface has been implemented across Renesas’ three MCU architectures to preserve customers’ engineering investments and shorten the system development cycle.”

The interactive tutorials included in the kit provide information that helps users verify the installed hardware and software, then give them hands-on instructions for creating, building, debugging and downloading their first project. Additionally, the tutorials illustrate how to use the support tools from Renesas and third-party suppliers that are part of the platforms, as well as how to make MCU performance measurements and evaluate on-chip MCU peripheral functions.

The third-party support tools supported by the demonstration platforms include products from IAR Systems, Segger, and KPIT Cummins Infosystems. IAR Systems provides a range of development tools for embedded systems including IDEs with C/C++ compilers and debuggers, development kits, hardware debug probes and state-machine design tools. Segger offers software products that include a real-time operating system (embOS), a TCP/IP stack (embOS/IP), an LCD driver and GUI package (emWin), an embedded File System (emFile), and a USB stack (emUSB). KPIT Cummins Infosystems delivers a complete set of free Renesas GNU tools.

Key features of the low-cost demonstration platforms include:

• Interactive tutorials that make it easy to learn the basic capabilities and benefits of Renesas software development tools
• The complete Renesas High-performance Embedded Workshop (HEW) integrated development environment (IDE) that includes project management functions and much more
• The HEW Target Server (HTS) software application, a COM object for Windows^® that can control the HEW IDE and provides an external stimulus for performing tests on code even before the final hardware is available
• An on-chip debugger that is integrated onto the platform’s target board
• A proven hardware design with a 1-Megabyte SPI flash memory, an audio jack, a 2.5-mm sound jack, pushbutton, light sensor, four LEDs, and an external header
• A choice of three boards for meeting different performance and cost requirements: the M16C Series, the R8C Series, and the H8/300H Series.

About Renesas Technology Corp.

Renesas Technology Corp. is one of the world's leading semiconductor system solutions providers for mobile, automotive and PC/AV (Audio Visual) markets and the world's No.1 supplier of microcontrollers. It is also a leading provider of LCD Driver ICs, Smart Card microcontrollers, RF-ICs, High Power Amplifiers, Mixed Signal ICs, System-on-Chip (SoC), System-in-Package (SiP) and more. Established in 2003 as a joint venture between Hitachi, Ltd. (TOKYO:6501) (NYSE:HIT) and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (TOKYO:6503), Renesas Technology achieved consolidated revenue of 953billion JPY in FY2006 (end of March 2007). Renesas Technology is based in Tokyo, Japan and has a global network of manufacturing, design and sales operations in around 20 countries with about 26,500 employees worldwide. For further information, please visit http://www.renesas.com