Renesas Electronics America Announces Expanded Ecosystem for RX100 Family of MCUs

Santa Clara, Calif. May 9, 2013 – Renesas Electronics America, a leading supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today (MCUs) with True Low Power™ technology and on-chip connectivity. The tools and middleware solutions, from leading technology partners including IAR Systems, SEGGER Microcontroller, Micrium, Express Logic, CMX, RoweBots, and FreeRTOS, make it easier and faster to design products based on RX100 MCUs, including devices for mobile healthcare, internet of things, smart meters, sensors/detector, and industrial and building automation applications.

"To support the market's needs for industry-standard development tools and middleware solutions, Renesas Electronics America has teamed up with select technology partners," said Ritesh Tyagi, senior director, microcontroller products, Renesas Electronics America. "The RX100 Series’ outstanding low-power characteristics and on-chip USB host and device functionality, combined with a well-established ecosystem, offer designers world-class solutions for low-cost 32-bit embedded systems."

New tools supporting the RX100 MCU architecture include:

• The e2studio integrated development environment (IDE) and RX-C compiler from Renesas
• IAR Embedded Workbench® and RX C-compiler from IAR Systems
• CMX-RTX (RTOS kernel) and CMX-USB (USB stack) ports by CMX
• ThreadX (RTOS kernel) and USBX (USB stack) ports by Express Logic
• FreeRTOS port by Real Time Engineers Ltd.
• µC/OS-III (RTOS kernel) and µC/USB (USB stack) ports by Micrium
• Unison RTOS kernel and USB stack ports by RoweBots
• embOS (RTOS kernel) and emUSB (USB stack) ports by SEGGER

These tools and middleware solution are available now and can be used with the first product group in the Rx100 series, the RX111, with USB host and device connectivity, motor control capability and advanced analogue functions.

“As a Renesas Platinum Partner and the only third-party tools vendor with support for the entire lineup of Renesas MCU families, we are very pleased to strengthen our strategic alliance to deliver best-in-class tools for the RX100 series,” said Robert DeOliveira, Director Strategic Sales for IAR Systems. “IAR Embedded Workbench for RX delivers outstanding scores on the EEMBC CoreMark benchmarks, achieving 3.08 CoreMark/MHz, and our compiler technology generates the smallest code footprint with the fastest compiler engine in the market, so the code requires less memory and processing power. This makes IAR Embedded Workbench the definitive choice of tools for all Renesas devices.”

"We have been partners with Renesas for many years. We already support the new RX100 subset of the RX family of MCUs with our middleware and also plan to support it with our J-Link family of debug probes as well as our ‘Flasher’ line of production programmers,” said Rolf Segger, Founder & CTO of SEGGER. “This will make it possible for customers to easily switch to the RX100 MCUs and take full advantage of the features of this new family, especially the low power consumption."

“Micrium supports the new Renesas RX100 product line with our highly acclaimed real-time kernels (uC/OS-II and uC/OS-III) as well as our uC/USB-Device stack. These high-quality embedded software components will allow embedded design engineers to develop robust and reliable products in the shortest possible time,” said Jean Labrosse, Founder, President and CEO of Micrium.

“Our customers in the fields of power metering and home automation find the Renesas RX family to be very appealing, and they often use our ThreadX RTOS, networking and USB middleware," said William E. Lamie, President of Express Logic. "Together, ThreadX and the RX100 Series of MCUs deliver small size, low cost, and powerful performance for high-reliability industrial and home-automation devices."

"As a Platinum Partner, CMX is proud to expand its existing support for the Renesas MCU family with the addition of the RX100 Family of MCUs," said Chuck Behrmann, President and CEO of CMX Systems. "This extended support benefits customers by bringing our excellent RTOS and middleware software to complement Renesas' lowest power, high-performance 32-bit MCUs."

"The Renesas RX111 is an amazing addition to the RX family. As a Renesas Platinum Partner, RoweBots has integrated our Unison POSIX RTOS with Zigbee and USB device support for the RX," said Kim Rowe, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of RoweBots. “Using the Unison RTOS, Zigbee-based M2M communication networks and small USB device applications run out of the box in just 10 minutes on RX development boards.”

"We are pleased to have the opportunity to extend our support for the RX family of MCUs, and especially pleased in this instance as we have used the launch to highlight our synergistic technologies: the low-power RX100 and the low-power tick suppression features of the FreeRTOS real-time kernel,” said Richard Barry, Director of Real Time Engineers Ltd and founder of the FreeRTOS project.

For more information about the RX100 family of MCUs, visit http://am.renesas.com/products/mpumcu/rx/rx100/index.jsp.
Or refer to the RX111 Press release: http://am.renesas.com/press/news/2013/news20130416.jsp

For more information on Renesas news, follow Renesas Electronics America on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RenesasAmerica.

About Renesas Electronics America Inc.

Renesas Electronics America Inc., headquartered in Santa Clara, California, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723), the world's number one supplier of microcontrollers and a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions including microcontrollers, SoC solutions, and a broad range of analog and power devices. Renesas Electronics America also offers the global manufacturing capabilities and fab network of its parent company. In the Americas, Renesas Electronics America markets and sells industrial-type active-matrix LCD modules from NLT Technologies Ltd., a global leader in innovative display technologies. More information about the products offered by Renesas Electronics America can be found at www.renesas.com.

Remarks
All product and service names that appear in this newsflash are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

The content in the press release, including, but not limited to, product prices and specifications, is based on the information as of the date indicated on the document, but may be subject to change without prior notice.