In a move intended to speed time to market for IoT and other embedded applications, Renesas has launched the Synergy platform, making available what the company calls ‘professional software’, as well as a range of MCUs, tools and other solutions.
Tim Burgess, senior director, multimarket solutions, said: “Our customers spend a lot of time doing non differentiating software development, dealing with drivers, middleware, rtos integration and connectivity issues.” Synergy is intended to address these issues and to allow designers to accomplish more than they could before.
According to Burgess, Synergy is a ‘complete qualified platform which can support design at the API level’. It features five key elements: scalable MCUs; professional software; development platforms; secure connectivity; and one stop support. “The Synergy Software Package brings together the ThreadX rtos, stacks, middleware libraries and an applications framework. It’s all about software,” he noted, “but hardware is also important.”
The S3 and S7 MCU families are available now. The S3 is based on ARM’s Cortex-M4 core running at 48MHz, while the S7 features the M4 core running at 240MHz. Two further families will be introduced: the S1, featuring the Cortex-M0+ core at 32MHz; while the S5, still being defined, is likely to be a ‘cut down’ version of the S7. All MCUs will feature a concentric footprint and, according to Burgess, ‘any peripheral on any device will be the same’.
“It different to anything we’ve done before,” Burgess concluded.
Author
Graham Pitcher
Source: www.newelectronics.co.uk