Renesas Electronics America Expands Its RX Microcontroller Ecosystem

Renesas Electronics America Inc. today announced the expansion of its RX600 microcontroller (MCU) ecosystem. The new products include a Wi-Fi® (802.11n) kit jointly developed with Redpine Signals, Inc., compiler support from IAR Systems, as well as various RTOS and middleware support from Micrium, SEGGER, CMX and FreeRTOS.

"The RX600 series is an extremely versatile MCU line, and we are committed to delivering a broad range of solutions to support RX designers,” said Ritesh Tyagi, director, Microcontrollers Product Marketing, Renesas Electronics America. "Renesas Electronics America is working with select technology partners to enhance the RX MCU ecosystem, providing design engineers with greater flexibility for designing their solutions using RX MCUs.”

Embedded Wi-Fi (802.11n) Kit for RX62N MCUs

Renesas Electronics America and Redpine Signals have jointly developed 802.11a/b/g/n wireless-connectivity solutions that make it easy for system engineers to add low-power, single-stream 802.11n Wi-Fi capability to embedded systems that use Renesas Electronics’ RX600 MCUs. These solutions are based on the Connect-io-n^TM modules from Redpine Signals® (http://www.redpinesignals.com/connection.html), which make it easy to design new systems and upgrade existing products to provide reliable wireless data communications while meeting stringent power and high throughput requirements.

The Connect-io-n 802.11n modules are fully self-contained, and Renesas Electronics customers can readily integrate them into any existing Renesas Electronics MCU-based system, including designs built with devices in the R8C, RX600 and SuperH (SH) families. The Redpine module products offer SPI and UART interfaces and provide robust and ultra-low-power wireless connectivity over 10 megabits per second (Mbps) on the SPI interface, or up to 4Mbps on the UART interface. Available with an option for TCP/IP and Web applications embedded within the Wi-Fi module, the Connect-io-n modules enable extremely small MCU driver footprints: less than 9 kilobytes (KB) for the SPI interface and less than 2KB for the UART interface. With modular certification for FCC and other equivalent certifications in other regions, these modules enable easy enhancement of existing RX-based designs with future-proof Wi-Fi 802.11n functionality. The RX62N Wi-Fi kit will be available for $199 through Redpine Signals beginning November 2010. (Pricing and availability are subject to change without notice.)

Robust RX Development Tools Environment

Since the introduction of the RX MCU family in 2009, Renesas Electronics has been steadily introducing new devices, features, tools and partnerships to expand the capabilities of the MCUs. Renesas Electronics supports its RX600 MCUs with a comprehensive proprietary hardware/software tool set and third parties. Renesas Electronics offers the popular High-Performance Embedded Workshop (HEW) integrated development environment (IDE). The HEW includes the RX-optimizing C/C++ compiler with integrated support for the low-cost E1 JTAG on-chip debugging tool, as well as the comprehensive E20 high-speed trace on-chip debugging tool. Third-party support for RTOS, middleware, communication protocol stacks, and color graphics is available from the global community of Renesas Electronics’ partner vendors.

One of the best tests of a new product is the ability to easily use it "out of the box.” Micrium has delivered particularly innovative "tools” supporting the RX family. First, the book, µC/OS-III: The Real-Time Kernel, by Jean Labrosse was recently published and will be provided to all attendees at the Renesas Electronics Developers Conference 2010.This book contains more than 700 pages of valuable information on how to use a kernel, but also approximately 200 pages on how to actually perform hands-on exercises using the Renesas Electronics RX62N-based companion evaluation board (YRDKRX62N, www.renesas.com/RDKRX62N). Micrium has also ported its µC/TCP-IP to the RX family to run the µC/Probe, Micrium’s award-winning run-time data monitoring tool. µC/Probe access to target data is also available through SEGGER’s J-Link for the RX family. Additional Micrium RTOS modules are being ported and will be announced shortly.

"The RX is an extremely clean architecture that addresses current and future processing needs,” said Jean Labrosse, founder, president and CEO of Micrium. "The RX MCU’s built-in floating-point unit (FPU) makes manipulating real-life engineering values a breeze, and the RX’s DSP functionality is a must-have for high-speed filtering and signal processing. The care taken by Renesas Electronics when defining the RX instruction set makes for highly efficient use of high-level languages, necessary for today’s embedded applications.” More information can be found at www.micrium.com/page/downloads/ports/renesas/rx_family.

SEGGER Microcontroller has introduced technology-leading solutions for the Renesas Electronics’ RX market, offering a wide toolset of development and production solutions. The portfolio includes embOS, an RTOS which is optimized for low resource usage; emWin, a professional graphics package; embOS/IP, the fastest IP-Stack offered for an embedded system; emFile, a file system with sophisticated features such as journaling and flash-memory-wear leveling; and emUSB, a USB device/host stack. A sample software package can be downloaded from www.segger.com/cms/renesas-rskrx62n.html.

SEGGER is also introducing the fastest RX debug probes available on the market. The time-proven J-Link emulator and the enhanced J-Link ULTRA emulator now offer support for the Renesas Electronics RX platform.

"Renesas Electronics launched a very attractive device with the Renesas Electronics RX family. We believe that the Renesas Electronics RX line is going to be a very successful family of microcontrollers,” said Dirk Akemann, partnership marketing manager, SEGGER. "As a result of the very close cooperation with Renesas Electronics, our embedded software, debugging and production tools are available right at the start of using the Renesas Electronics RX devices. The new RDK for Renesas Electronics’ RX62N development kit is already fully supported by SEGGER’s complete portfolio including the market-leading J-Link emulator as an on-board-solution. Our middleware perfectly complements the RX core as well as the sophisticated peripherals of the device.”

CMX Systems, a well-known designer of real-time operating systems, TCP/IP stacks, flash file systems and USB software, now offers its widely deployed CMX-RTX real-time operating system, the small-footprint CMX-MicroNet TCP/IP stack, the full-featured CMX-TCP/IP stack, as well as a variety of CMX-FFS flash file systems for the Renesas Electronics RX600 MCU Series. CMX-USB host and device software will be available soon. All CMX products are provided as full source code with free technical support and without royalties.

"CMX Systems is pleased to offer our suite of embedded software products for Renesas Electronics’ RX600 family,” said Chuck Behrmann, CEO of CMX Systems. "We have had a strong track record in providing solutions for Renesas Electronics MCU families, and we expect that RX600 MCU customers will obtain the same benefits including accelerated application development and reduced RAM and flash usage when incorporating our embedded software in RX600 based designs.”

More information can be found at www.cmx.com.

FreeRTOS now has released fully maintained ports of its popular operating system targeting the RX architecture with specific communication stacks for the RX62N.

Recognizing the advantage of the wide compiler choice available for RX devices, three separate ports have been developed to support the Renesas Electronics, IAR Systems and GNU toolchains. Each port includes demonstration applications designed to run on a number of platforms including the Renesas Starter Kit (RSK) and the Renesas Demonstration Kit (RDK). These demonstrations range from simple flashing of LEDs using a number of the operating system’s key features (designed as a kick-start for target-application development) to a full TCP/IP web server. Best of all, these ports are available for download and are totally royalty free under a modified GPL license (FreeRTOS) or with technical support and warranty as OpenRTOS (chargeable). More information can be found at www.freertos.org/FreeRTOS_RX62N_Renesas.html.

IAR Embedded Workbench® provides a highly optimized C and C++ compiler for the RX MCU family and is in full compliance with the Renesas Electronics RX ABI. It also offers integration with Renesas Electronics E1 and E20 debugging hardware along with other third-party debuggers. IAR Systems® brings in a large middleware ecosystem support for the RX family through a wide network of fully qualified and tested RTOS/middleware in the industry.

"IAR Systems is very happy to be working with Renesas Electronics and supporting its new RX MCU family. These new 32-bit MCUs allow customers to work on designs that operate at high performance while at the same time offer very low power consumption,” said Nadim Shehayed, U.S. general manager, IAR Systems. "Recently, our benchmark study for RX compilers showed the advantage of IAR Embedded Workbench for RX MCUs for generating efficient software with small memory footprint.” More information can be found at www.iar.com/renesas.

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 offers local manufacturing in Roseville, California, and the global manufacturing capabilities of its parent company. In the Americas, Renesas Electronics America markets and sells industrial-type active-matrix LCD modules from NEC LCD Technologies, Ltd., a global leader in innovative display technologies. More information about the products offered by Renesas Electronics America can be found at http://am.renesas.com/.

Connect-io-n and Redpine Signals are trademarks or registered trademarks of Redpine Signals, Inc. IAR Embedded Workbench and IAR Systems are registered trademarks of IAR Systems AB. Wi-Fi is a registered trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance.