IAR Systems has announced that Renesas Electronics’ RX microcontroller architecture is the next target architecture to benefit from the power debugging technology included in IAR Embedded Workbench.
With the help of power debugging, embedded software can be developed and tuned to save power by exercising stricter control of how and when the hardware consumes power. The battery lifetime in mobile applications can be extended by keeping the power consumption down and also the heat dissipation is reduced.
By correlating system power consumption, IAR Embedded Workbench can trace data and the source code. Company officials said that this makes it possible to analyze how software can be designed to conserve power and discover any power glitches.
“We designed the RX core to be best-in-class when it comes to performance, code and data density, and power consumption,” said Ritesh Tyagi, director of product marketing for Consumer and Industrial Business Unit at Renesas Electronics America.
Tyagi said that traditional software development tools only address utilization of the first two design targets, but with the innovative power debugging technology from IAR Systems, embedded developers also can now stay in control of power consumption.
In IAR Embedded Workbench, power measurements can be visualized in various ways. Company officials said that simultaneous display of power samples, call stack, interrupt activity and variable values on the same timeline maps key events in the execution against power consumption.
Moreover, power debugging is enabled by an IAR J-Link Ultra emulator probe. Company officials said that it provides the hardware connection and power sampling.
IAR Embedded Workbench for the Renesas Electronics RX MCU architecture is expected to be available from mid-December 2010.
“As the company supporting the highest number and widest range of Renesas Electronics microcontrollers in the industry, it is important for us to make our new innovations available for Renesas Electronics customers,” said Nadim Shehayed, area manager for U.S. at IAR Systems.
The modern RX core complements the company’s power debugging technology, Shehayed said, adding that the advanced low-power features of the RX devices can be utilized better when the software development process incorporates power debugging to provide insight into how the application influences power consumption.
Earlier this month, IAR Systems announced support for the ARM (News 
- Alert) Cortex-A5 core within IAR Embedded Workbench.
Anshu Shrivastava is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anshu’s articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Chris DiMarco
