Renesas has released a virtual development environment that enables the creation and operational evaluation of automotive application software that supports the latest electrical/electronic architecture (E/E architecture) requirements. The environment includes a virtual turnkey platform, which enables the development of application software before the devices or evaluation boards are available. In addition, the new environment offers a multicore debug and trace tool, which allows users to analyse and evaluate the operation of their software as if it were running on a real chip. These tools will enable customers to start development and enter the market faster with state-of-the-art software.
"As the E/E architecture evolves, there is a growing demand for software design that maximises system-level performance. At the same time,the increasing time and cost associated with software development has become a major challenge," said Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Vice President, Automotive Software Development Division at Renesas. "Our integrated software development environment, which can be used across gateway systems, ADAS and xEV development, allows customers to benefit from the scalability of Renesas products such as R-Car and the RH850 family for both software and hardware development."
The features of the Renesas development environment
This platform consists of the R-Car Virtual Platform (R-Car VPF) development environment and a software development kit (R-Car SDK) that includes pre-validated software libraries and sample code. R-Car VPF is based on the Virtualizer Development Kits by Synopsys and integrates R-Car-specific virtual intellectual property (IP) models to be customised for R-Car devices. Overlaying the R-Car SDK on this platform allows application software development to begin immediately in virtual mode. The platform accurately recreates the behaviour of the real chip and thus eliminates the need to create a development environment with a physical evaluation board. Multiple users can also develop software simultaneously on separate PCs or servers.
Multicore Debug and Trace Tool' for analysing and evaluating software operation
The development environment is available for the R-Car S4 SoC, which is suitable for automotive gateways. Renesas also plans to support the R-Car V4H SoC, as well as future versions of its R-Car products and RH850 series microcontrollers, also built for automotive applications.
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