Renesas Electronics America announces Eclipse-based integrated development environment

DESIGN West 2012, SANTA CLARA, USA: Renesas Electronics America, a leading supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, announced an Eclipse-based integrated development environment, the Eclipse Embedded studio, also known as e2studio, designed to provide a flexible development platform for its market-leading microcontrollers (MCUs).

The e2studio IDE will be demonstrated at Renesas’ booth at the DESIGN West Conference in San Jose, Calif. At the same event, Renesas’ tool partner Micrium Inc. will also hold courses on their µC/TCP-IP Ethernet stack as well as their µC/OS-III real-time operating system using e2studio and the Renesas Demonstration Kit (RDK) for the RX62N group. With the release of the e2studio in May 2012, developers of Renesas’ RL78 RX600, and RX200 series of MCUs will be able to benefit from Eclipse-based build and debugging capabilities as well as the established Eclipse CDT functionality.

Over the last few years, the Eclipse C/C++ Development Tooling, or CDT, has gained significant momentum. Up to now, many developers have 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 the Eclipse CDT following the current Helios release, therefore ensuring future-proof development. Renesas developers took great care to ensure that e2studio was developed based on the standard Eclipse CDT framework, keeping any customization to an absolute minimum to ensure the portability of the plug-in technology.

The e2studio IDE is supplied with build-phase plug-ins for Renesas, IAR Systems, Green Hills Software and the free KPIT Cummins GNU compilers. Debug support includes Renesas’ E1 & E20 on-chip debuggers, Renesas’ IECUBE full specification emulators and Segger J-Link debugger. Renesas implemented a GDB interface with DSF extensions so that features such as real-time memory view, real-time expression view, and trace can deliver the powerful debugging necessary for today’s embedded code development.

Renesas Electronics America will supply e2studio to development engineers either bundled with best-in-class Renesas toolchains, such as the RX compiler, or as a free download from its website to be paired up with the free KPIT Cummins GNU compilers for RX, RL78, and V850. Along with plug-in support for the compilers, each version will also include project management, version control, project generators, and other productivity tools.

Renesas has also recognized that many customers already have an established Eclipse environment. To ensure that these designers can easily develop code for the Renesas controllers, a full set of build and debug phase plug-ins is also available for free. 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 e2studio.

With the availability of e2studio in May 2012, development engineers working with Renesas controllers will be able to 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.