Have you ever worked on a team that had amazing, world changing ideas but the barriers to get started and to market were just too great to overcome? Maybe the development team had a funds shortage or a competitor right on their heels. Perhaps the development team couldn’t find an expert firmware engineer to deal with the microcontroller. The Renesas Synergy™ Platform is designed to help companies lower their barriers to entry by providing the tools that allow developers to be
Inspired to innovate
Develop and expand without restrictions
Simplify development
The Synergy Platform can help inspire innovation by removing financial, technical and development time barriers that otherwise would consume the development teams’ energy and creativity. My favorite example is how Synergy Platform users have access to high quality, commercial-grade tools and software such as the IAR Embedded Workbench® for Synergy and the Synergy Software Package (SSP). Using this commercial software allows a team to leverage existing and proven application code, frameworks and middleware to develop sophisticated applications in very short time periods. Just the fact that all the low and middle level software has already been developed could decrease development time by up to 30%! Such a time savings allows either an early product launch or more time to develop cool and innovative features that the end users will love.
Developers using the Synergy Platform have the ability to develop and expand without restrictions. What I mean by this is that developers have no limitations on time, code size, number of users for software, tools and utilities. Developers have access to the entire platform with a single microcontroller purchase or through the many affordable development kits that allow a developer to rapidly prototype an application. The Synergy Platform provides common APIs and code reuse across a scalable and fully compatible microcontroller family. This allows developers and teams to easily scale their application complexity. A team doesn’t even need to worry about bug fixes or updates as these are provided in a known time frame at no additional cost to developers.
Considering everything that we have discussed so far, it is easy to realize that all these tools help simplify development. Professional software and tools allow extensive debugging, code analysis and even thread monitoring. The platform abstracts out the nitty-gritty details by providing intuitive tools and graphical configurators. For example, developers have access to GUIX™ Studio, at no additional charge I might add, that allows a developer to quickly and easily design a human machine interface (HMI) from a PC and then transfer it to the target device. A developer could easily spend weeks, if not months, getting graphics peripherals, touch screen controllers and artwork to display and work properly. Using the Synergy software and tools, a developer can download the GUIX “Hello World” application note (located at https://www.renesas.com/en-us/products/synergy/tools-kits.html#) and in less than an hour have a fully functional GUI that uses an RTOS, SPI, I2C, touch controller, graphics controller and is fully functional!
The Synergy Platform is lowering barriers for engineers, removing high out-of-pocket expenses just to get started and allowing them to focus on their product differentiators rather than on simply making their microcontroller work. Project managers will undoubtedly focus on cost and time savings but for engineers, the Synergy Platform frees us from a repetitive cycle where we build drivers, middleware, integrate and if we are lucky innovate. Instead, engineers can now innovate from day one, focusing on the application features at hand that will allow their product to revolutionize their industry.
In the next post, we’ll begin a deep dive into the IAR EW for Synergy and the capabilities that it provides developers.
Tip of the Week
For those of you that can’t wait till next week to get started with IAR EW for Renesas Synergy you can view this video to see how easy it is to download and install the necessary software components. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2b44JsLq4A&index=11&list=PLgUXqPkOStPu_uZCwn_1tM2QZIRDhcbCR