Low-Power Design

March 1st, 2011 - Uppsala, Sweden. - IAR Systems today announced the availability of the world's first software development tools that support the latest family of microcontrollers from Renesas Electronics Corporation, IAR Embedded Workbench for RL78. The long-term and close cooperation with Renesas, as well as IAR Systems' long experience with Renesas architectures including the R8C and the 78K families, has resulted in tools of unrivalled performance. In addition, this collaboration has allowed Renesas' lead RL78 customers to be already using the new tools from IAR Systems.

Adding to the already extensive range of supported Renesas cores, IAR Systems commitment to support all microcontrollers available from Renesas stands firm. Well over 5,000 Renesas devices are now supported in one single environment, facilitating code reuse between projects. "The introduction of IAR Embedded Workbench for RL78 consolidates our position as the leading tools supplier for all Renesas microcontrollers. We are the only tool chain in the world that can offer support for the complete Renesas MCU portfolio", said Mats Ullström, Product Director, IAR Systems. "Our popularity stems from the fact that we have, for almost 30 years, delivered the sharpest tools in the industry and provided customer support that is second to none!"

The RL78 family is designed for use in low-power applications. The powerful IAR C/C++ compiler contributes to keeping the power consumption down by generating code very tightly fitted to the RL78 CPU core. For example, the compiler makes full use of the new hardware multiplier/divider for faster arithmetic. This makes the execution run faster and allows the microcontroller to enter one of its low-power modes after fewer clock cycles. Together with intelligent linking, the compiler provides unrivalled software performance.

IAR Embedded Workbench for RL78 is a set of C and C++ tools for building and debugging embedded system software for Renesas RL78 microcontrollers. It provides a completely integrated development environment including a project manager, editor, build tools and debugger. In a continuous workflow, source files and projects can be created, built and debugged on hardware or in a simulator.

IAR Embedded Workbench for RL78 features integrated support for the E1 and IECUBE emulator systems, allowing debugging on hardware including instruction trace. A number of analysis features including profiling and code coverage allows the application to be tuned and tested beyond what is possible with less powerful tools. The debugger also features a Timeline window displaying a graphical view of the interrupt log and the call stack on a shared timeline. This view provides a clear view of the system's basic behaviour.

A time limited Evaluation edition and a code size limited KickStart edition of IAR Embedded Workbench for RL78 can be downloaded for free from www.iar.com/ewrl78

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