Renesas Electronics Europe Expands the Ecosystem for its RL78 Microcontroller Family

“To support the market’s need for industry-standard development tools and middleware solutions, Renesas Electronics Europe has teamed up with selected technology partners,” said Mohammed U Dogar, Manager of Microcontroller Product Marketing, Industrial Business Unit, Renesas Electronics Europe. “The RL78 family’s outstanding low-power characteristics and extensive line-up, combined with a well-established ecosystem, offer designers world-class solutions for 8- and 16-bit embedded systems.”

IAR Systems’ Embedded Workbench® provides a highly optimized C and C++ compiler for the RL78 MCU family and supports the E1 on-chip debugger and IECube in-circuit emulator tools, both from Renesas Electronics. Additionally, the Embedded Workbench comes bundled with the C-SPY® real-time debugger and the instruction simulator.

We’re pleased that our partnership with Renesas Electronics enables us to add development tool support to the new RL78 series of MCU devices,” said Thomas Winkler, Director European Sales, IAR Systems. “Our industry-standard IAR Embedded Workbench will bring a complete ecosystem development environment to the RL78 MCUs. In addition, we are now able to provide Renesas Electronics customers with high-quality service and technical support,” he added. More information can be found at www.iar.com/ewrl78.

“Embedded designers can gain a competitive edge by using Micrium’s feature rich, reliable, efficient, compact and scalable µC/OS-II and µC/OS-III kernels, which have been ported to the RL78 family of processors”, said Jean Labrosse, founder, president and CEO of Micrium. “Battery-operated, power-sensitive and eco-friendly applications can further benefit from Micrium’s µC/OS-II's and µC/OS-III's ability to easily enter the RL78 MCUs’ SNOOZE and HALT modes when idling.” More information about Micrium can be found at http://micrium.com/page/home.

The RL78 MCU port can be found at http://micrium.com/page/downloads/ports/renesas/renesas_rl78_family.

CMX Systems, a well-known supplier of real-time operating systems, has ported its CMX-RTX operating system to Renesas Electronics’ RL78 MCU family. “We are pleased to be able to provide Renesas Electronics RL78 MCU customers with access to our small-footprint, low-latency RTOS,” said Chuck Behrmann, CEO of CMX Systems. “The CMX-RTX is a truly pre-emptive, multi-tasking RTOS offering one of the smallest footprints, fastest context switching times, and lowest interrupt latency times available.” More information can be found at www.cmx.com.

About the Renesas Electronics RL78 Microcontroller Family

Renesas Electronics’ RL78 microcontrollers are the first family of MCUs to be developed using an integrated platform following the merger (between NEC Electronics Corporation and Renesas Technology Corp.) and to employ the new 130nm process. The RL78 family of MCUs combines and extends technology from the earlier R8C and 78K 8-bit and 16-bit MCUs from the two merged companies, contributes to lower overall system power consumption, provides an extensive variety of different product versions, and helps developers reduce overall system costs. More information about the RL78 MCU family can be found at http://www.renesas.eu/rl78.