T
ools
& S
oftware
grated hardware/ software approach. A num-
ber of the new capabilities in the development
tool ecosystem reflect that philosophy. Smart
Manual is an excellent example. One of the
more daunting problems developers face as
embedded designs grow increasingly complex
is how to efficiently manage and use the thou-
sands of pages of documentation that accom-
pany each design. Given that solutions based
on the Synergy Platform can feature hun-
dreds of hardware and software components,
the user manual for a project can run into
the thousands of pages. How do developers
quickly and efficiently find the information
they need?
Renesas engineers address this problem with
a new tool called Smart Manual. The Synergy
Tools have the ability to reuse design docu-
mentation in a context-aware manner while
the tool is in use. For example, an engineer
is configuring a device and activating named
and known registers. As he or she moves the
cursor over each register name, the tool will
pop up information related to that register.
When the engineer clicks on that information
or accesses help, a context-aware link appears
to additional data associated with that partic-
ular feature in an easily searchable format. It
even pulls in relevant app notes and media-
rich instructional material according to the
topic at hand.
While this type of technology has been used
with Renesas hardware before, the same
capability is now available for the Synergy
Software Platform (SSP). Hardware register
definitions and associated data can lie hidden
in many different documents. Similarly, infor-
mation for software APIs is often hard to find.
For the first time, the Synergy Platform Smart
Manual provides this context-aware capabil-
Figure 2. The Synergy Project Generator simplifies configuration and code generation by offering
five graphic configurators for different functions.
Figure 3. To accelerate development, Smart Manual features a context-aware link to additional
data on both hardware registers and software components within the ISDE editor.
