Renesas Electronics Corporation, a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, on October 19, 2017, announced that the Renesas e2studio integrated software development environment now has been expanded with new features to support the R-Car V3M system-on-chip (SoC) for in-vehicle infotainment and advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS). e2studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) based on the open-source Eclipse C/C++ Development Tooling (CDT) software and already supports other Renesas devices including the RZ/G Family and the Renesas Synergy microcontrollers (MCUs). Expanded to support the R-Car V3M, the e2 studio can now be used as a core tool for automotive SoC software development. The e2studio-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 e2studio, 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 optimize power efficiency. Each IP uses its own programming languages, toolchain, trace interface, and debugging protocols, which enable system developers to maximize 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 program 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 visualizes 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 toolchain, 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 toolchain, 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 optimize the basic functions of the integrated development environment including source code creation, building and debugging when necessary. In addition, Renesas’ partner tool vendors who specialize 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.
Availability
The e2 studio for R-Car V3M will be available in Q1 2018.
Renesas plans to further expand the e2 studio to support additional automotive devices.
The e2 studio-based R-Car V3M solution will be displayed at the EclipseCon Europe 2017, October 24-26 at Ludwigsburg, Germany, https://www.eclipsecon.org/europe2017/.
