Embedded design does not get any simpler! New market requirements such as IoT and all its baggage mean that as a designer your skillset needs to span multiple disciplines. It also means your time becomes even more precious!
Whilst new architectures such as Renesas Synergy™ are designed to support you in overcoming the complexity of additional design requirements such as connectivity and security, on top of your application fundamentals, you still need to learn how to use them! Whenever you select any new platform or technology from any supplier, just knowing where to start learning can be a nightmare, especially when you need to get started quickly and you need to do it by yourself. In this post, we’re going to look at some options for doing this, then deep dive into a new learning platform that we’re pleased to offer to support your own learning journey.
When you consider learning, we all know that hands-on, face-to-face knowledge transfer from an expert works best, especially when you are talking about “black magic” topics such as wireless frameworks or power design. But what if you cannot travel to a specific location on a specific day, or you want to learn at 9pm on a Tuesday night? Not always convenient. Webinars are great too – direct contact with an expert, and maybe you can ask questions if it is live, assuming the timing is convenient. But you are working at someone else’s pace, and a webinar is typically less than one hour or even thirty minutes to keep people’s attention, so doesn’t really get down into nuts and bolts. YouTube! Video tutorials can get you started, help solve problems and help you learn, but if you find the exact topic you are looking for, you are still working at someone else’s pace play > pause > play > pause… This pacing problem does have a solution, which is online learning using specially built courses covering a range of different, bite-sized topics. (Admittedly, sometimes big bites)! I can’t finish here without mentioning books – I learned recently that despite all this technology they still exist! I am joking, but we know from the experience of thousands of printed copies that many of our microcontroller users enjoy the convenience of having a real book next to their kit that they can browse at their own pace, leaving the screen free for development work. And there is always the alternative that offers the same content (and more) and pacing as a book but is more interactive, which is the fully linked, video supported, e-book.
All of the above have great value to your learning journey, and while they all have pros and cons, together they can provide you with the learning experience that works for you, which is our goal at Renesas.
Maybe we’ll come back to some of these other learning methods and how you can access them to get up and running fast with Renesas products and the application areas they support, but for now I want to turn attention back to online learning, and Renesas Academy.
Bringing all learning materials together in one place, Renesas Academy provides the convenience of learning what you want, when you want and at your own pace. You can go online and quickly find the courses you need by product, technology and type. Every course is broken down into short modules so you can learn at your own speed, whenever you want to do it.
Renesas Academy includes courses on all of our industry-leading microcontrollers, microprocessors, the revolutionary Renesas Synergy™ Platform, where this kind of training is a great way to get started with its huge software ecosystem available to you, as well as our analog and power components.
You can learn about how to achieve True Low Power design with RL78. You can learn how to take advantage of the massive scalability and performance features found in RX. You can learn how to apply microcontroller design principles to deliver very high end user interfaces and drive solutions using the RZ microprocessor. For Renesas Synergy, you can go from learning about what makes this platform revolutionary, through to software environments and tool utilities, then more complex topics such as RTOS components and frameworks. And for analog and power components, we’ve selected a number of exciting new technologies from USB Power Delivery ICs to Analog Power Modules, and take you from design principles to leveraging key features and performance optimizations.
We’ll continue to add new courses, new content and new features, so be sure to keep checking back. We’d also love to hear from you if there’s a specific course you’d like to see, but first take a look at what’s there now!
All you need to do is visit www.renesas.com/academy, do a simple one-time registration, select your course and get started!