OREANDA-NEWS. June 19, 2015. Renesas Electronics, a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced the Renesas Synergy™ Platform, a new, easy-to-use, qualified platform designed to accelerate time to market, reduce total cost of ownership and remove many of the obstacles engineers face as they develop products for the growing Internet of Things (IoT) and industrial markets. The Renesas Synergy Platform achieves this by using an innovative approach to new product design that lets embedded systems engineers start product development at the API level, giving them more time to design innovative and differentiated features.

“Engineering teams used to spend valuable development time writing software ranging from low-level peripheral drivers to complex communication and specialty stacks. This resulted in months of engineering resources spent integrating, testing, and maintaining software that didn’t differentiate the end-product in the market,” said Ali Sebt, Senior Vice President, Renesas Electronics Corporation. “By enabling engineers to start design at the software API level and enjoy a real-time control system without the need to build any baseline functionality, the Renesas Synergy platform accelerates embedded development, inspires innovation and enables differentiation.”

The Renesas Synergy Platform

The Renesas Synergy Platform integrates qualified software with a new family of MCUs and an ecosystem of tools and support options into one scalable and secure platform. It includes all rights and benefits to enable rich software development for an unlimited number of end products. There is no need to purchase third-party commercial RTOS, communication stacks (TCP/IP, USB), file systems, graphic user interfaces and their associated development tools – all are included in the Renesas Synergy platform. As the Renesas Synergy Platform is a fully integrated product and not a set of separately sourced software and hardware components, Renesas provides technical support and licensing for the platform. This reduces the cost and time overhead required to manage relationships with different hardware and software component manufacturers.

Key elements of Renesas Synergy Platform include:

Renesas Synergy Software Package

The Renesas Synergy Platform uses qualified embedded software, tested to commercial standards with ensured compatibility across all Renesas Synergy MCUs. The Renesas Synergy Software Package (SSP) includes Express Logic’s X-Ware™. X-Ware includes the premier ThreadX® real time operating system (RTOS) plus X-Ware middleware NetX™ and NetX DUO™ IPV4 and IPv4/IPV6 TCP/IP stacks respectively, USBX™ USB Host/Device/OTG protocol stack, FileX® MS-DOS compatible file system and GUIX™ graphics runtime library. These are bundled in the Renesas application framework that is completely optimized for use with Renesas Synergy MCUs and compliant to the IEC/ISO/IEEE-12207 Software Life Cycle Process standard. Sold, maintained, and directly supported by Renesas, the software is guaranteed by Renesas to operate as per a published specification.

Renesas Synergy Microcontrollers

Within the Renesas Synergy Platform, there is a new, scalable MCU family that spans a wide spectrum of performance, power usage, safety, security, cryptography, connectivity, and graphics capabilities. The family provides customers a variety of choices to meet their requirements for IoT designs ranging from low-end battery powered products to complex communication and user interface hubs.

Renesas Synergy Tools, Kits, Solutions

The Renesas Synergy Platform’s Eclipse-based integrated solution development environment (ISDE) is available with C compilers from GNU and IAR Systems. Also available are Express Logic’s Windows® based GUIX™ Studio graphic user interface prototyping tool and TraceX® real-time event graphical analysis tool. Customers can begin full development with the purchase of any one of many low-cost Development or Starter Kits available for each of the Synergy MCU series. Renesas will also offer a number of Renesas Synergy Product Example kits, each one an example of an actual commercial product. Customers can leverage this information to modify the Product Examples to fit the needs of their own similar end products.

Renesas Synergy Gallery

Renesas recognizes the widely varied needs of product developers in the IoT space and their desire for plug and play add-on software components to reduce development time. Renesas satisfies this need with the Renesas Synergy Gallery, an online selection of quality software products from third-party software vendors that augment the Renesas Synergy Software Package. Customers may browse and download Renesas Synergy Software Package-compliant software for functions and features such as specialized communication stacks, control algorithms, and security services.

Renesas Synergy Support

All components of the Renesas Synergy platform are supported directly by Renesas, giving customers a single point for contact for integrated support spanning software, Renesas Synergy MCUs, and hardware solutions. This unified support structure eliminates the struggle customers often encounter when trying to get hardware and software vendors to take ownership of a technical problem. Customers will not need to purchase service or maintenance contracts. Renesas warrantees the specification, provides regular feature upgrades and addresses all product questions through our global sales support organization.