Renesas Electronics Europe Announces Eclipse-Based Integrated Development Environment

With the release of the e2studio, developers of Renesas’ RL78, RX and V850 families of MCUs can now benefit from Eclipse based debugging capabilities as well as the established CDT functionality. Support for the SH-2/2A RISC MCUs is also in development and will be released shortly.

Over the last few years, significant momentum has built up behind the Eclipse C/C++ Development Toolkit, or CDT. Many developers have already discovered its powerful editing and project management capabilities, but have lacked the truly generic debug support they need. Renesas has architected e2studio to be compatible with future releases of Eclipse CDT following the current Helios release, ensuring future-proof development. Great care has been taken to ensure that e2studio has been developed based on the standard Eclipse CDT framework. Any customisation has been kept to an absolute minimum to ensure the portability of the plug-in technology.

The e2studio is supplied with build phase plug-ins for Renesas, IAR, Green Hills Software and the free-of-charge KPIT Cummins GNU compilers. Debug support includes Renesas’ E1 & E20 on-chip debuggers, Renesas’ IECUBE full specification emulators and Segger J-Link debugger. Having implemented a GDB interface with DSF extensions, features such as real time memory and trace deliver the powerful debugging necessary for today’s embedded code development.
Renesas will supply e2studio technology to development engineers either bundled with best-in-class Renesas toolchains, such as the RX compiler, or as a free-of-charge download from its website. Along with plug-in support for the compilers, each version will also include project management, version control and other productivity tools.

Renesas has also recognised that many customers already have an established Eclipse environment. To ensure these engineers can easily progress to developing code for the Renesas controllers, a full set of build and debug phase plug-ins is also available free of charge. Existing customers of Renesas’ High-performance Embedded Workshop (known as HEW) will benefit from the planned migration utility that will enable them to import existing projects into the e2studio.
Initially the e2studio will be widely promoted in Europe and USA, and other regions are expected to follow later, depending on their local requirements.

Now that the e2studio is available, development engineers working with Renesas controllers can choose from a wide range of compilers and debuggers based on proprietary IDEs, such as IAR Systems Embedded Workbench or Green Hills MULTI®, as well as a truly open-source Eclipse solution.