For embedded engineers, time is usually the hardest constraint: waiting for boards, wrestling with fragmented tools, guessing at the right modules, and stitching everything together under pressure.
In an exclusive conversation with Neb Matić, Founder, MIKROE I got a clear picture of how MIKROE is trying to remove those bottlenecks – and why a major microcontroller vendor like Renesas has decided to back its approach.
Who is MIKROE?
MIKROE is an embedded systems company focused on reducing development time and complexity for MCU-based designs. Founded in 2001 by Neb Matić, the company builds a broad, tightly integrated ecosystem of hardware tools, software frameworks, and open standards aimed at rapid prototyping and early-stage product development.
At the core of MIKROE’s offering is its Click board portfolio – compact peripheral boards for sensors, connectivity, power, displays, and interfaces – built around the mikroBUS socket standard. mikroBUS is widely adopted by silicon vendors and board makers, allowing engineers to add functionality to a target MCU with minimal schematic work or firmware bring-up. MIKROE complements this with development boards, programmers/debuggers, and processor-module standards.
On the software side, MIKROE provides NECTO Studio, a cross-platform IDE, alongside mikroSDK, which abstracts hardware differences and enables portable driver reuse across MCU families. This hardware-software co-design approach targets engineers working across multiple architectures, helping teams move from evaluation to proof-of-concept quickly.
Overall, MIKROE positions itself as an enabler of fast, modular embedded development, bridging vendor ecosystems while keeping engineers close to the hardware.
Multi-year deal with Renesas
Kicking off 2026, MIKROE signed a multi-year MCU development tool support deal with Renesas Electronics. This will commit MIKROE to providing development tools for 500 of Renesas’ most popular MCUs, plus upcoming new releases. A ‘Planet Debug’ remote board farm, which enables developers anywhere in the world to remotely debug code without having to invest in any hardware, has also been established – the first of its kind for Renesas.
Tool support for the Renesas MCUs will be provided via MIKROE’s NECTO Multi-Architectural IDE and Click board compact add-on boards that enable developers to rapidly provide proof-of-concept, then prototype and code new embedded projects. Click boards are fully compatible with the open source mikroBUS socket and can be used on any host system supporting the mikroBUS standard. They come with the mikroSDK open-source libraries, offering flexibility for evaluation and customisation.
“We are very excited about this collaboration deal with Renesas,” said Matić. “Developers need only to download the latest version of NECTO Studio. This will give them access to development tool support for many popular Renesas MCUs. We are launching with 500 specified MCUs and will add new devices as they are launched. If you read about a new device, you will immediately be able to start programming and debugging with it through NECTO without having to wait for hardware.”
MIKROE has been rolling out its Planet Debug remote board farms in Europe and the Americas and is planning to promote jointly with Renesas the hardware-as-a-service platform through extensive webinars and other programmes. Designers using Renesas devices can reserve time – free of charge – on the remote board farm which is configured to their requirements. This enables them to develop and debug their own applications code remotely through the NECTO Studio IDE without having to source the hardware, wait for it to arrive and then configure it. Planet Debug remote board farms are enabled by MIKROE’s innovative CODEGRIP, the world’s first device which allows programming and debugging to be performed over Wi-Fi.
“The beauty of Planet Debug is that, through NECTO, you can remotely see real images of real boards in real time – it is not a simulation,” comments Matić.
So why did Renesas partner with MIKROE? Because MIKROE can turn interest into action almost instantly.
“After the customer reads [about this news], just imagine that they could try that microcontroller or that silicon minutes after. No waiting for a sample, no waiting for the board,” said Matić.
“This collaboration with MIKROE empowers our customers to begin development with our newest MCUs, immediately after they are announced. This gives them a significant head start and cost savings. By leveraging 24/7 access to boards on MIKROE’s Planet Debug remote board farms and choosing from thousands of functional code examples on the EmbeddedWiki embedded projects platform, Renesas customers gain direct access to code development resources that accelerate time to market,” said Mohammed Dogar, Vice President, Embedded Processing Marketing at Renesas.
That promise is powered by three pillars: the Nectar IDE, Planet Debug, and EmbeddedWiki, all tied together by a universal SDK and an in‑house AI code generator.
AI, long before it was a buzzword
MIKROE’s in‑house AI code generator sits at the heart of its NECTO Studio IDE, and it’s very different from the fashionable “just plug in ChatGPT” approach. The company has spent close to a decade building what it originally called “automatisation,” training its model on millions of lines of its own, highly standardised embedded code. Unlike general‑purpose models trained on random Internet code, MIKROE’s model is fed with their own, standardised, production‑quality code.
“It’s not enough that you have a lot of codes. You have to fulfil standardisation to your code. And then when you feed AI models with proper code, you get good output … Other models use codes they find all over the Internet. It doesn’t mean it’s working. Our code must work [and does work],” notes Matić.
In practice, this means engineers can select a development board and a handful of click boards, hit the AI button, and watch the tool generate complete, compilable embedded code in seconds.
In a demo Matić showed me, the AI combined five different peripheral boards plus a complex TFT display into roughly 300 lines of working code, all ready to flash to a real device via Planet Debug.
“Everybody says there is an AI generator,” Matić says, “but only MIKROE can prove it is working.”
The goal is not to replace engineers, stresses Matić, but to compress the ‘plumbing’ work so they can focus on design and refinement.
A complete ecosystem
For MIKROE, the Renesas agreement is more than a commercial win; it’s validation of a 20‑year bet on standardisation, reuse, and accessibility. What began with a simple idea has evolved into a complete ecosystem of hardware, software, content, and now AI, all aimed at giving embedded engineers a ‘high ground’ to start from.
As Matić puts it, tools can’t remove the need for effort, but they can radically shrink the amount of time and energy wasted before real engineering work begins.
