September 2016
22
C
ontrollers
& P
rocessors
To succeed in this market developers will
need MCUs that offer an extensive set of
communication peripherals, analog I/O, sig-
nificant on-chip memory and a diverse port-
folio of security and safety functions. But the
embedded design market already has many
semiconductor suppliers offering full-fea-
tured MCUs. The key to taking advantage of
this coming avalanche of IoT applications will
be the ability of each MCU vendor to help
lower the total cost of ownership for custom-
ers and get development projects to market
quicker. To win in the IoT market develop-
ers must eliminate many of the low-level, but
time-consuming integration tasks they have
had to grapple with in the past. Tradition-
ally, developers begin at the silicon level and
then have to wade through multiple software
and tool options to find the best solution for
their particular application. They must spend
valuable time evaluating each vendor, under-
standing their licensing terms and IP acqui-
sition costs. And the work only begins once
the developer purchases software or tools.
The time and energy developers spend track-
ing each vendor can be significant. More often
than not, each tool, stack and RTOS vendor
has a separate roadmap forcing the developer
to keep up with the latest releases as they add
new features.
At the same time the development team must
spend time integrating all of the software
components from multiple vendors, then
testing and qualifying at the system level to
maintain high quality levels while keeping
abreast of changes in the marketplace and
the latest advances in best development prac-
tices. Invariably designers must delay work-
ing on the truly differentiated aspects of their
design - the end-application code or new fea-
tures - until the end of the development cycle.
In the long run the developer faces enormous
uncertainty, the risk of cost overruns and a
late entry to market.
The Renesas Synergy Platform is designed to
circumvent these obstacles. To minimize cost
of ownership and allow developers to begin
quickly developing code for their application,
the Renesas Synergy Platform treats hard-
ware and software as a single unified prod-
uct. The benefits begin at the silicon level. The
platform is built around a family of compat-
ible and scalable MCUs based on the ARM
Cortex-M core. Common features across
the MCU portfolio simplify product devel-
opment. These upwardly compatible MCUs
combine extremely low power consumption
with a small silicon footprint, an extensive set
of peripherals and up to 4 MB of on-chip code
flash. To meet emerging IoT requirements,
each MCU offers a diverse set of communica-
tions interfaces and a broad array of security
and safety features.
But the real payoff in terms of lower cost and
faster development comes at the software level.
Each Renesas Synergy MCU comes with a
comprehensive package of qualified software
components. Included in the cost of the MCU,
the Renesas Synergy Software Package (SSP)
features all the crucial software components
engineers need to build the basic core system
functions essential in any IoT development
project. Built around Express Logic ThreadX
RTOS, the SSP includes middleware compo-
nents from Express Logic X-Ware and adds
MCU-specific software components such as
device drivers, middleware, libraries and a
flexible framework with an API.
Each component in the platform is integrated,
tested, qualified, scalable and reusable. As
a result, designers spend less time on driver
implementation, middleware and RTOS inte-
Figure 1. By simplifying the management of key software components and tools, the Synergy
Platform reduces the total cost of ownership.
Figure 2. Renesas Synergy Platform dramatically shrinks the development cycle by providing
a comprehensive package of qualified software components that eliminates much of the work
developing non-differentiated code.
