Renesas Releases New Version of e2studio IDE for RX and RL78 MCUs

The new version represents the official release of e2studio in the Americas and features additional software debugging support like profiling and code coverage as well as a new project import function to allow developers to use their existing High-Performance Embedded Workshop (HEW) RX projects in the e2studio environment. This new feature makes it easy to migrate from HEW to Eclipse. The e2studio IDE was created to allow developers working with Renesas’ RL78 and RX families of MCUs to leverage the benefits of working with Eclipse-based development tools.

The Eclipse platform and the associated C/C++ Development Tooling project, or CDT, has gained significant momentum with developers as they have discovered its powerful editing and project management capabilities.

“Eclipse is becoming the de-facto standard IDE for embedded software development in the US and in Europe,” said Ritesh Tyagi, Senior Director, Microcontroller Products & Solutions Marketing, Renesas Electronics America. “Eclipse allows software engineers to standardize their development tools which reduces the need for training and leads to faster development. Renesas architected e2studio to be compatible with the standard Eclipse CDT framework, keeping any customization to an absolute minimum to ensure the portability of the plug-in technology.”

With the release of e2studio version 1.1, Renesas is transitioning away from the use of proprietary IDEs, like HEW and CubeSuite+, towards development tools based on open source software like Eclipse. e2studio is available free of charge to customers and fully supported by Renesas.

The e2studio IDE is supplied with build-phase plug-ins for Renesas, IAR Systems, Green Hills Software and the free KPIT Cummins GNU compilers for RX and RL78. Debug support includes Renesas’ E1 & E20 on-chip debuggers, Renesas’ IECUBE full specification emulators and the Segger J-Link debugger. Renesas implemented a GNU Debugger (GDB) interface with DSF (Debugging Services Framework) extensions so that features such as real-time memory view, real-time expression view, real-time chart view, and trace can deliver the powerful debugging necessary for today’s embedded code development.

e2studio support for the Renesas SH-2/SH-2A and RH850 MCUs is also in development. The SH and RH850 support will be available in Q4/12 and Q2/13, respectively.