Oct 14 2010
Renesas Electronics America Inc. today introduced Velocity Lab(TM), a suite of Renesas Electronics and third-party development components designed to enable customers to develop embedded solutions quickly, easily and cost-effectively.
Velocity Lab ties together advanced technologies in model-based design, simulation and automatic code generation allowing customers to narrow the gap between design strategy and production while providing the flexibility to create solutions that meet changing market needs.
“As electronic control units become more complex and time-to-market demands increase, we have found that designers often have limited flexibility to change components for next-generation systems. The potential of these systems is limited by cost, time and redesign effort,” said Paul Fox, director, segment marketing, Automotive Business Unit, Renesas Electronics America. “Previous attempts to improve the development process have lacked integration and interoperability. With Velocity Lab, Renesas Electronics America took a clean look at the problem and built the solutions, partnerships and components from the ground up to deliver a well-integrated suite of development components from Renesas Electronics and partner companies.”
What is Velocity Lab
Velocity Lab is a toolkit that includes best-in-class development components from Renesas Electronics and its partners. The platform allows designers to build complex, embedded solutions easily and economically while simultaneously leveraging the latest technology for efficiency gains. The result is a more nimble design team that can react quickly to changing market needs. In this inaugural version, Velocity Lab will provide immediate gains to automotive system designers, beginning with powertrain and body applications.
Key features of the Velocity Lab environment include complete code generation and a virtual development environment. Complete production-level code is generated in an integrated manner using Mathworks’ tools for strategy, SimuQuest’s QuantiPhi for drivers, and ETAS’s OSEK for scheduling. QuantiPhi is integrated into Simulink and provides function blocks to directly control I/O peripherals. It also has an intuitive user interface that allows for full microcontroller (MCU) configuration without requiring detailed knowledge or specification of the controller.
Velocity Lab also provides for transaction-level, cycle-accurate simulation of an entire system or portions of it. Specifically, the system plant model executes in Mathworks’ Simulink, while the cycle-accurate microcontroller model executes in a simulation environment from Synopsys or ASTC. The microcontroller model executes the code as generated from the Simulink QuantiPhi package. The fully virtual platform requires no simulation hardware, and many debuggers connect to the microcontroller simulator to allow standard debug capabilities.
The Velocity Lab community of third-party suppliers is collaborating with Renesas Electronics America to support customers. These partners include, and are not limited to, Applied Dynamics International (ADI), Australian Semiconductor Technology Company (ASTC), ETAS, Invirtech, Mathworks, Pi-SHURLOK LLC, SimuQuest, Inc., and Synopsys, Inc.
Availability
Velocity Lab is available to support Renesas Electronics’ 90-nanometer (nm) SH7254x and SH7253x MCU families for powertrain applications. Renesas Electronics America is also developing a Velocity Lab solution for the R8C and the V850 microcontroller families and expects to also port the solution to the RX Group and other MCUs in the future. As the offering expands, the platform will enable new efficiencies across a range of automotive, industrial and consumer applications.
Source: http://www.am.renesas.com/