Renesas Electronics Corporation, a provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, has launched a virtual development environment that enables advanced development and operational evaluation of automotive application software to support the latest electrical/electronic architecture (E/E architecture) requirements.
The environment includes a ready-to-use virtual platform that allows engineers to develop application software before devices or evaluation boards are available. Additionally, it offers a Multicore Debug and Trace tool, which allows users to analyze and evaluate the operation of their software as if it were running on a real chip.
These tools will enable customers to start development and get to market faster with cutting-edge software.
“With the evolution of E/E architecture, there is an increasing demand for software design that can maximize system-level performance. At the same time, the increasing time and costs associated with software development have become a major challenge,” said Hiroshi Kawaguchi, vice president of Automotive Software Development Division at Renesas. “Our integrated software development environment that can be used in gateway systems, ADAS and xEV development allows customers to benefit from the scalability of Renesas products, such as R-Car and the RH850 family, for software and hardware development.”
As software becomes a critical part of automobiles, customers' application software becomes larger and more complex. To increase the value of their software, customers are looking for new development methods and environments to develop highly reliable software faster.
The virtual platform
The Virtual Turnkey Platform consists of the R-Car Virtual Platform development environment (R-Car VPF) and a software development kit (R-Car SDK) that includes pre-tested software libraries and sample code.
The R-Car VPF is based on Synopsys' Virtualizer Development Kits (VDKs) and integrates R-Car-specific intellectual property (IP) virtual models to customize for R-Car devices. By overlaying the R-Car SDK on this platform, it allows engineers to immediately begin virtual application software development.
This platform accurately recreates the behavior of the real chip and thus eliminates the need to build a development environment with a physical evaluation board. Multiple users can also develop software simultaneously on separate PCs or servers.
Debugging and tracing
After engineers complete development of multiple software components side by side on the Virtual Turnkey Platform, the next step is to integrate the software and verify that it works on a single chip.
Software components share resources such as multiple CPUs and IPs in R-Car SoCs. If operational issues are detected after the integration of software components, a lot of work will be required to analyze and resolve these issues.
With this in mind, Renesas created the Multicore Debug and Trace tool, which simplifies the process of analyzing and identifying the causes of errors that occur due to the interaction of multiple hardware resources in R-Car SoCs.
This allows synchronous and simultaneous debugging of the entire heterogeneous R-Car architecture without using the actual device. This helps to identify potential problems and thus speeds up the development process.
