Integrated software development environment for ADAS

Expanded to support the R-Car V3M, the e² studio can now be used as a core tool for automotive SoC software development. The e² studio-based R-Car V3M solution is part of Renesas autonomy, which was announced in April 2017.

“We are excited to provide our open-source e² studio IDE along with our automotive SoC for ADAS and automated driving. The e² studio has been upgraded for R-Car V3M with various features to boost the performance of ADAS and automated driving applications,” said Akiya Fukui, Vice President, Software Development Division, Broad-Based Solution Business Unit, Renesas Electronics Corporation. “With the new e² studio, we enable our customers to achieve improved development efficiency and faster time-to-market.”

Renesas’ low-power, high-performance R-Car SoCs consist of a heterogeneous architecture with various types of intellectual properties (IPs), including central processing units (CPUs) and accelerators, to optimise power efficiency. Each IP uses its own programming languages, toolchain, trace interface, and debugging protocols, which enable system developers to maximise the functionality and performance of the IP to optimally develop various software and applications for ADAS and automated driving.

To make full use of the computing performance and low-power performance of each IP, including the integrated IMP-X5 image recognition engine, Renesas has added various new features to e² studio. System developers using e² studio for R-Car V3M can develop software for various IPs installed in the R-Car V3M with a comprehensive and unified graphical user interface (GUI) to accelerate time-to-market for ADAS and automated driving systems.

Key features of the e² studio for R-Car V3M:

Enhanced ADAS software development support

• Multithreaded programming environment: The e² studio includes a unified GUI provided by Eclipse that supports programming for the IMP-X5’s built-in 64 thread processor. The e² studio for R-Car V3M incorporates the newly developed IMP-X 5-dedicated ccimp C compiler which enables development in C programming language. It also provides a feature that debugs the operation of threads on a step-by-step basis from the GUI, which contributes to reducing the man-hours required for programme development to approximately one-tenth.
• Image viewer: The IDE with a simple UI configuration enables system developers to check the image generated by IMP-X5 directly from the GUI. This eliminates the need to store the image for image verification, making it easier to check images.
• IP tracer: The e² studio visualises the interaction between subcomponents in IMP-X5, which enables software developers to solve complex software errors linked to a specific IP at an early stage. This contributes to a shorter software development period.
• Bus Traffic Monitor: The IDE monitors the amount of data being transferred through the complex bus structure in the SoC. In the past, data transfer delays were identified by trial and error. With the e² studio, developers can pinpoint the bottleneck, reducing the time required for software tuning by half.

Complete one-stop solution for developing software on the R-Car V3M
The e² studio provides in one-stop image recognition libraries for the tool chain, PC simulator, and IMP-X5. This frees system developers from setting up and updating complicated individual development environments and allows them to focus on development to further add value to their product. Furthermore, since all developers can use the same tool chain, simulator, and libraries, it contributes to securing the quality of the software developed.

Various development environments can be developed by using tools created by the Eclipse community
The e² studio makes it easy for system developers to incorporate a variety of plug-ins provided by the Eclipse community. This allows system developers to add and optimise the basic functions of the integrated development environment including source code creation, building and debugging when necessary. In addition, Renesas’ partner tool vendors who specialise in Eclipse can create new tools using the new features of the e² studio. Based on these tools, system developers can further expand their development environment.