Toolchain supports “Renesas Starter Kit” development suite

A key differentiator of the RZ/A1 MPU is the abundance of up to 10MB of embedded SRAM. This is sufficient to remove the need for external RAM. Numerous customer benefits stem from this, including: hardware costs are reduced by moving from a 3-chip solution (CPU, Flash, RAM) to a 2-chip solution (CPU, Flash); software performance is increased because the RAM is connected directly to the internal bus, so there is no external interface delay; and designs can be simpler, more compact, and therefore get faster to market.

The RZ/A1 series of embedded microprocessors is a Cortex-A9 based microprocessor, optimised for the Human Machine Interface (HMI) market. It supports up to WXGA (1280x800) displays, is able to drive two screens concurrently, and includes up to two camera inputs. RZ/A1 series MPUs also include all the connectivity for a standard application: for instance, 10/100 Ethernet, two channels of USB 2.0, and up to five channels of CAN.

Tim Burgess, Head of Marketing, Renesas Electronics Europe, comments: “We are proud of our longstanding relationship with IAR Systems; the inclusion of the support for the RZ Starter Kit adds another string to the already impressive show of support from this long-term partner. In an environment where tools can be the decisive factor between a successful or failing development, Renesas is very glad to have IAR Systems’ support. The IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM IDE provides a clear competitive advantage for Renesas and enabled the RZ/A1 to reach an outstanding EEMBC CoreMark benchmark score of 4.15.”

“In our continuous effort to provide Renesas customers with the best-in-class C/C++ development tools, debugger and analysis tools, while being the only tools vendor for the entire Renesas MCU/MPU architectures, we are extremely pleased to announce that IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM is now fully supported by the Renesas RSK starter kit,” added Stefan Skarin, President and CEO, IAR Systems. “Customers have the choice to evaluate the high-performance RZ/1A devices with sample applications, as well as peripheral device initialisation code including the LCD display using the IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM IDE. IAR Systems brings outstanding performance in execution time, code size footprint, power debugging with an efficient and easy to use runtime analysis integrated in the development environment. In addition, customers will have the ability to perform kernel awareness debugging with ThreadX and GUIX and Micrium µC/OS-III.”