SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 3, 2014 — Renesas Electronics America, a leading supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, announced that the IAR Systems® industry-leading tool chain – IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM® – fully supports the RZ/A1 Renesas Starter Kit (RSK) development suite.
A key differentiator of the Renesas RZ/A1 MPU is an industry-leading 10MB of on-chip RAM to support faster device control, graphics, digital audio processing, and much more. The large on-chip RAM removes the need for external SDRAM, enabling low-power, cost-effective embedded display applications at up to WXGA resolution. The RZ/A MPUs can also drive two displays and execute code in-place from cost-effective QSPI flash memory. Numerous customer benefits stem from this: hardware costs are reduced by moving from a 3-chip solution (CPU, Flash, RAM) to a 2-chip solution (CPU, Flash); software performance is increased because the RAM is connected directly to the internal bus, so there is no external interface delay; and designs can be simpler, more compact, and therefore get faster to market.
Time-to-market can be significantly improved by selecting the right tool chain and software partners. Renesas is proud to align with IAR in this effort. An evaluation version of IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM can be downloaded at www.iar.com/ewarm.
"Developing prototypes quickly and reliably takes on greater importance as embedded design complexity increases and the time-to-market window shrinks, particularly for HMI-rich consumer and industrial applications. A complete MPU solution with the right ecosystem partners can be the difference in making that window of opportunity,” said Ritesh Tyagi, vice president of marketing, Renesas Electronics America. “Through our collaboration with IAR Systems, and its support for the RZ/A1 RSK within its EWARM tools, we are able to help customers accelerate their code writing and testing. The combination of the RSK, which is an incredibly rich prototyping platform for the RZ/A1 MPU, and IAR’s industry-leading RZ/A1 EEMBC CoreMark benchmark score of 4.15 makes for a highly productive and successful design experience."
The RZ/A1 series of embedded microprocessors is a Cortex®-A9 based microprocessor, optimized for the Human Machine Interface (HMI) market. It supports up to WXGA (1280 x 800) displays, is able to drive two screens concurrently, and includes up to two camera inputs. RZ/A1 series MPUs also include all the connectivity for a standard application: for instance, 10/100 Ethernet, two channels of USB 2.0, and up to five channels of CAN.
"In our continuous effort to provide Renesas customers with the best-in-class C/C++ development tools, debugger and analysis tools – while being the only tools vendor for the entire Renesas MCU/MPU architectures – we are extremely pleased to announce that IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM is now fully supported by the Renesas RZ/A1 RSK starter kit,” said Stefan Skarin President and CEO of IAR Systems. “Customers have the choice to evaluate the high-performance RZ/A1 devices with sample applications as well as peripheral device initialization code, including the LCD display, using the IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM IDE. IAR Systems combines outstanding performance in terms of execution time, code footprint, power debugging with efficient and easy-to-use runtime analysis integrated into the development environment. In addition, customers will have the ability to perform kernel–aware debugging with ThreadX and GUIX and Micrium µC/OS-III®."
About Renesas Electronics Corporation
Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723) delivers trusted embedded design innovation with complete semiconductor solutions that enable billions of connected, intelligent devices to enhance the way people work and live. A global leader in microcontrollers, analog, power and SoC products, Renesas provides comprehensive solutions for a broad range of automotive, industrial, infrastructure, and IoT applications that help shape a limitless future. Learn more at renesas.com. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
About IAR Systems
IAR Systems is the world’s leading supplier of software tools for developing embedded systems applications. The software enables over 46,000 large and small companies to develop premium products based on 8-, 16-, and 32-bit microcontrollers, mainly in the areas of industrial automation, medical devices, consumer electronics, telecommunication, and automotive products. IAR Systems Group AB is listed on NASDAQ OMX Stockholm. For more information, please visit www.iar.com.
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