RX Blog - Blog

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…embedded devices were single-threaded, standalone, and relatively straightforward to design. Those days are clearly over. With 50 billion connected devices predicted for 2020—the so-called Internet of Things (IoT)—even the most deeply embedded systems will face issues with scalability, modularity, connectivity, and reliability that were far more manageable in the past.…

Designing an embedded device today is much like developing an SoC—it involves integrating the disparate pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle. Choosing the right MCU is a good starting point, but getting all the software pieces to work together is the real challenge. Renesas is going a long way toward solving that puzzle with its Firmware Integration Technology (FIT).

Renesas supplies many types of firmware, including…

The Internet of Things (IoT) is projected to be the Next Big Thing (NBT), with as many as 50 billion connected devices online by 2025. Only one problem: the Internet of People (IoP?) has already gobbled up most of the available IP address spaces.

The current 32-bit IPv4 makes available 2³² or approximately 4.3 billion IP addresses, not nearly enough to enable the massive machine-to-machine (M2M) communication that…

The Renesas RX62T has long been a workhorse for motor control applications. RX63T MCUs extend those capabilities, especially in high-pin count versions.

High pin-count versions of the RX63T include more memory, connectivity options, and timers. These chips extend the RX series’ capability for motor control, with small pin-count RX63T designed for control of one motor, RX62T for two motors, and the new high pin-count…

If any field has been moving swiftly it’s low-power design. No matter how involved you are in the field there’s always something more to learn. Unfortunately the learning process is usually haphazard and time consuming: reading datasheets, articles, white papers, and books and searching numerous web sites.

Renesas has set out to address this problem with DevCon Extension 2014, a series of short courses and…

Embedded designs keep getting more complex, but fortunately the tools for crafting them keep getting better. Renesas has just updated its Eclipse-based e²studio IDE to take advantages of the latest Kepler release as well version 8.3 of the Eclipse Code Development Toolkit (CDT). E²studio version v3.0 adds a number of new plugins and features that greatly expand the power of the program.

With 12 pages of release notes…

High on the list of debug nightmares is tracking down the root cause of the strange runtime errors that can occur when a stack overflows—causing overwritten variables, wild pointers, corrupted return addresses, etc. These problems will never be easy to troubleshoot, but the tools for chasing them down just got markedly better. IAR Systems has introduced stack usage analysis to version 2.60 of IAR Embedded Workbench for…

Yesterday I posted a review of the BDTI Speaker Compensation Algorithm running on the RX63N RDK. In the video at the end I used a pair of pretty high quality little speakers that really failed to demonstrate just how well the algorithm works. The algorithm boosts the bass, evens out peaks, and helps prevent overload distortion of tiny speakers—none of which my previous test speakers needed.

For a much better test…

You can hardly expect music coming from the tiny speaker on your cell phone to be high fidelity, but at least you can expect the voice on the other end of a phone call to be intelligible—which is often not the case. Fortunately there are speaker enhancement algorithms that can overcome both problems, and Berkeley Design Technology Inc. (BDTI) has supplied one for Renesas RX600 developers.

The BDTI Speaker Compensation…

The number of machines communicating over the Internet already exceeds the number of online humans—a number that promises to leave us in the dust over the next several years. Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication over the Internet—the so-called Internet of Things (IoT)—is already revolutionizing the industrial, commercial, and medical device markets. Building high-end IoT applications—including Smart Factory and Smart…

Portable designs have long been hampered by the laws of supply and demand—an insufficient supply of energy and an excess of demand for it. Battery technology hasn’t progressed much since the advent of Li-Ion cells, and unless you’re comfortable with a thorium-based energy source there isn’t a lot of room for improvement.

On the demand side semiconductor engineers have made great strides over the…

As motors are used in increasingly sophisticated applications—from disk drives to infusion pumps—their control circuitry has become increasingly complex. Whereas 8-bit MCUs might adequately control small DC motors in simple applications, vector control of high-precision AC synchronous and BLDC motors requires a 16- and preferably 32-bit MCU.

The table below highlights the more processor-intensive motor control…

Wireless sensor networks aren’t quite everywhere yet but they're getting close. Increasingly bridges, buildings, airplanes, assembly lines, turbines, and even medical patients are being monitored for stress and other abnormalities by ultra-low-power wireless sensor nodes. Because remote nodes are often powered by energy scavenging or at least very small batteries that might prove difficult to replace, the embedded intelligence…

Many years ago I read a book on time management that encouraged readers to constantly ask themselves, “What is the best use of my time right now?” Good question, especially for embedded developers.

Software is the biggest time sink in any development project. Why spend valuable time writing your own USB, TCP/IP, memory manager and other routines when an RTOS and validated middleware can do that for you? An…

If your next RX-based application will be at all compute intensive you need to look into Renesas’ DSP library for RX MCUs. The recently released version 3.0 contains 36 kernels and 314 functions, including filters (134), statistics (45), transforms (48), and matrix (40) and complex functions (47). Version 3.0

• Added one more filter kernel “Generic IIR”
• Scaled definition to allow gain and attenuation…

Many if not most MCU-based applications involve taking actions based on sensor data. If that action involves changing the load cycle in a dishwasher, for example, the result of a component or system failure may only be annoying; if it involves the operation of heavy machinery or a moving automobile, such a failure can be disastrous.

The automotive, medical, and industrial control markets are large and growing quickly…

In case you missed the last Renesas DevCon—or missed some important tracks—or just need to get back up to speed, Renesas is doing its best to bring the content directly to you. Starting next month and throughout the remainder of the year Renesas will be presenting DevCon Extension 2014—40 one-day sessions in Canada, the U.S., and Brazil. Each day will consist of short courses and hands-on labs in one of five…

We recently blogged about IS2T’s MicroEJ Java platform for Renesas RX MCUs. MicroEJ Java platforms run on top of Micrium kernels leveraging their RTOS services, including the TCP/IP stack, File System, and USB Host and USB Device stacks. MicroEJ automates most of the Java programming for you, providing a fast path to developing complex graphical interfaces that can leverage the full capabilities of RX MCUs. IS2T claims…

Just in time for the holidays, Renesas has introduced a new development kit that should be a hit. Rather than go on about it, here's a quick video that explains it all--in the spirit of the season:

www.youtube.com/watch

Since Renesas introduced its popular Power of Two program along with Micrium, it’s continued to expand it. Early on Micrium made μC/GUI available, which added touchscreen support for Renesas’ Embedded GUI Solution Kit (YLCDRX63). As we reported earlier, the Micrium GUI toolkit greatly speeds graphical interface design. Before long IAR Systems joined in, contributing a free license to a full version of…

When your cell phone fails it can be annoying; when an assembly-line robot fails it can be expensive; when an airborne radar system fails it can be catastrophic. In order to quantify and mitigate risk industrial control systems are increasingly required to be certified as compliant with IEC61508, which can be a daunting—not to mention expensive—task. Addressing that issue Renesas and IAR Systems have announced a new…

While we’ve been focusing on the RX111’s low power and connectivity capabilities, the 32 MHz CPU with hardware accelerators, multiplier, divider, and barrel shifter—all these things together make the RX111 a nice solution for motor control. The RX111 can control permanent-magnet synchronous motors (PMSM), BLDC, and AC induction motors, driving anything from a small 20W motor to a KW motor depending on the inverter solution…

Renesas’ new high-performance RXv2 CPU core substantially boosts the signal processing capability of an already industry-leading core—from 3.2 to 4.0 Coremark/MHz—while at the same time reducing power consumption by 40%. How did they do that?

First, the speed improvement. General CPU performance was improved by the adoption of a 5-stage dual-issue pipeline structure that executes FPU/DSP instructions…

Designed with low-power sensor applications in mind, the Renesas RX110 and RX111 come equipped with a flexible 12-bit successive approximation (SAR) ADC that can process up to 14 analog inputs or temperature sensor outputs. A double trigger function enables their use for motor control, an application that generally requires a larger, more expensive MCU.

The RX111 ADC specs out well for such a small device. Integral…

Renesas’ recent rollout of the RX111 extended the reach of its RX family down into the ultra-low-power domain (100 μA/MHz). With an onboard 12-bit/14 channel ADC and 8-bit/2 channel DAC the RX111 is well suited to low-power sensor nodes that will feed the bulk of the data into the Internet of Things (IoT). There is no lack of industrial, commercial, medical, and consumer applications for which the RX111 will be…