MCU-based LED drivers inspire designs

Development tool support for RL78/I1A lighting MCU
For application design and development tasks, Renesas offers a wide spectrum of state of the art hard and software development tools, application notes and on-site tools training (by appointment). In addition, 3rd parties in Europe and other continents offer development tools for Renesas products.

Hardware development tools
The hardware development tools range from the entry level evaluation boards, low cost serial interface Emulator (E1 Emulator) right up to full real time In-Circuit Emulators (IECUBE).

Evaluation board: The RL78/I1A family demonstration kit can be used by customers for an initial product “get to know” task. The kit comprises the RL78/I1A based board with 3 LED channels, DALI and DMX connectors, allowing the customer to evaluate the dedicated features of the ASSP and the dedicated lighting GUI tools included in the kit. It is a comprehensive tool, which allows customers to get an initial feel for the MCU features without having to make the effort to design their own hardware and software.

E1 emulator: The low cost serial interface on-chip debugger (E1 Emulator) is a powerful development and debug tool featuring on-board programming, program execution, memory and register manipulation etc. The E1 Emulator has a simple 4-pin interface between the host and the device. The actual serial mode debug communication is carried out over just a single pin of the device. The E1 Emulator supports standard software tools such as the C-Compiler and Assembler, and has a powerful GUI.

In-circuit emulator: The In-Circuit Emulator (IECUBE: QB-RL78I1A-TxxSP) is a powerful full-fledged real time emulation and debugging tool with comprehensive break and real time trace functions and user friendly GUI. The IECUBE supports both Renesas’ proprietary software tools and 3rd party software tools – for example, those from IAR Systems (Sweden).

All hardware tools use a standard IBM compatible PC as host.

Software development tools
Complementary to the above mentioned hardware tools, Renesas and 3rd party language simulation and debugging software tools are available. In Europe, the IAR Embedded Workbench (EWRL78-FULL-EE) from IAR Systems is promoted.

The IAR Embedded Workbench, an IDE with a powerful GUI, supports application development. The debugging suite consists of IAR proprietary C-Compiler, Assembler, and C-Spy debuggers and interfaces with Renesas IECUBE and E1 emulators.

For initial device configuration and evaluation purposes, Renesas also offers a free of charge GUI based development tool called AppliletEZ. This tool assists the user in configuring on-chip functions for the required lighting application on the RL78/I1A MCU without the customer needing to know each MCU register structure at bit level. Out comes a pre-compiled C-code at the flick of a switch. This is a boon for customers to start with Renesas MCUs, especially if they are not familiar with them.

To further ease the development/debugging of lighting applications, a comprehensive set of GUI tools for DALI and DMX communications is available from Renesas.