Renesas Electronics Corporation has introduced a virtual development environment that allows advanced development and operational evaluation of automotive application software to support the latest electrical/electronic architecture (E/E architecture) requirements. The new environment provides a multicore debug and trace tool that allows users to analyze and evaluate the operation of their software as if it were running on an actual chip.
These tools will enable customers to start development and get to market faster with leading software. Additionally, the environment includes a virtual turnkey platform that allows engineers to develop application software before a device or evaluation board is available.
Hiroshi Kawaguchi, vice president of Renesas Automotive Software Development Division said:“With the development of E/E architectures, there is an increasing need for software design to maximize performance at the system level. At the same time, the time and cost associated with software development continues to increase and has become a huge challenge ,” "Our integrated software development environment for gateway system, ADAS and xEV development enables customers to benefit from the scalability of Renesas products such as software and hardware development for the R-Car and RH850 series."
The platform accurately reproduces the behavior of the actual chip, thus eliminating the need to build a development environment using a physical evaluation board. Multiple users can also produce software simultaneously on different PCS or servers. The platforms include the R-Car Virtual Platform (R-CAR VPF) development environment and the Software Development Kit (R-Car SDK), which contains pre-tested software libraries and sample code. R-car VPF is customized for R-Car devices based on The Virtualizer Development Kits (VDK) of Synopsys and combined with r-CAR proprietary virtual models. By overlaying the R-Car SDK on this platform, it allows engineers to immediately start developing applications virtually.
Once engineers have developed multiple software components side by side on the Virtual Turnkey Platform, the next step is to assemble the software and verify that it runs on a single chip. Software components share resources, including multiple cpus and ips on r-Car soCs. If operational problems are discovered after integrating software components, considerable work is required to analyze and resolve them. With this in mind, the company created a multi-core debugging and tracing tool that simplifies the analysis and identification of the cause of errors that occur when multiple hardware resources interact in r-Car soCs.
This allows synchronization and simultaneous debugging of r-Car's full heterogeneous architecture without using the actual device. This helps identify potential problems, which speeds up the development process.
