Renesa Electronics has launched a complete integrated development environment, enabling ECU level vehicle software development without hardware

Renesa Electronics (TSE: 6723), a global semiconductor solution provider, today announced the launch of a new integrated development environment platform, enabling engineers to quickly create software for automotive ECUs (electronic control units) containing multiple hardware devices. This fully integrated environment supports collaborative simulation, debugging and tracking, high-speed simulation, and distributed processing software on multiple SoCs and MCUs - all without the need for actual hardware. The software development environment is in line with the transformation of the automobile industry to a "software first" product development model, that is, the value of automobiles is increasingly determined by software. And the software design method of "moving left", which emphasizes the completion of software verification and validation at the early stage of the development cycle before the introduction of hardware. The first development environment tools released by Renesa are now available for its R-Car S4 and RH850/U2A product families.

Renesa Electronics has launched a complete integrated development environment, enabling ECU level vehicle software development without hardware

Yushi Kawaguchi, Vice President of Software Development Department of Renesa Electronics, said: "Renesa is committed to creating a complete integrated development environment, helping our customers in the automotive field realize their vision of 'software first', and at the same time continuing to support the evolution direction of their 'left shift' software development. We firmly believe that this development environment will help our customers transform the E/E architecture, promote the early development of ECU and new products, and ultimately bring greater value."

Integrated Development Environment for Multi Device Configuration ECU Development

Renesa's integrated development environment supporting multiple devices can promote software development at the ECU level, add additional value to the vehicle, and help the design concept of "software first". By building a simulation environment at the early stage of product development, the platform allows verification and application development before actual equipment and ECU production to achieve the "left shift" design concept.

The integrated environment provides the following development support:

1. Multi device collaborative simulation environment to help ideal system design

Reza builds a new simulation environment for multi device operation by integrating and connecting R-Car virtual platform and other simulators. This platform previously provided single chip single devices for SoC and microcontroller. At present, this development environment can optimize the design by balancing different application functions and incorporating software validation at the system level. At the same time, it will bring development tools for automatically generating equipment software code and ®/ Simulink ® Simulation environment for model validation. These tools will allow engineers to evaluate the performance and start application development before the hardware and ECU are put into production.

2. Debugging and tracking tools for multiple devices to visualize problems

In order to visualize the internal operation of the software, Renesa has introduced a debugging and tracking tool that allows simultaneous and synchronous execution, breakpoint execution control and information tracking of ECUs containing multiple devices. With this tool, users can visually see the processing flow, evaluate the performance configuration, and predict the possible problems of operating multiple devices in the same ECU in a complex way. Renesa plans to achieve the same functions above in the multi device collaborative simulation environment described in (1) above, so that debugging and tracking can be realized on computers without ECUs.

3. High speed simulator for software development, which can realize fast and large-scale simulation

In ECU level simulation, the target software is usually large, and the simulation execution takes a long time. This new high-speed simulator is based on QEMU, which enables faster ECU level simulation of complex software. QEMU, as an open source virtual environment, models SoC and microcontroller in a highly abstract way.

4. Distributed processing software for multiple devices can be designed without considering hardware configuration

The software optimally distributes application functions to CPUs and IPs in different SoCs and microcontrollers in ECU, so as to maximize hardware performance. With this software, engineers can quickly develop applications without being limited by ECU hardware configuration. For example, developers can add AI accelerators to existing ECUs to enhance system performance without having to redesign applications to accommodate new devices.

The new development platform aims to reduce environmental impact, shorten time to market and save energy by providing turnkey solutions.

Supply information

• Multi device collaborative simulation environment (now available), please visit www.renesas.com/software-tool/co-simulation-environment-multi-devices.

• Debugging and tracing tools for multiple devices (now available), please visit www.renesas.com/software-tool/debug-and-trace-tools-multi devices.

• High speed simulator for software development (launched in December 2022), please visit www.renewas.com/software-tool/high-speed simulator software development.

• Multi device distributed processing software (launched in December 2022), please visit www.renesas.com/software-tool/distributed-processing software multi devices.