Renesas Electronics Corporation, a supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, has introduced a new online, cloud-based IoT system design platform that enables users to graphically build hardware and software to quickly validate prototypes and accelerate product development.
Today’s development cycle is cumbersome engineers research and define the project, collect device information and requirements, layout hardware, develop software, test, and iterate until the product is ready to release to market. This process is typically done sequentially, and each step takes a significant amount of time. Often the software development phase consumes the most engineering power and ultimately becomes the biggest bottleneck.
With Renesas’ Quick-Connect Studio, engineers can now perform hardware and software development simultaneously. This is a radical shift in the industry, enabling designers to build software immediately with the ability to quickly reconfigure and test product ideas. This yields dramatic time savings and reduces risk as engineers can validate designs before committing to hardware layout.
Quick-Connect Studio empowers engineers to graphically drag and drop device and subsystem blocks on the Cloud to build their solution. After placing each block, users can generate, compile, and build software automatically, a major shift towards the no-code paradigm of development. This makes building production-level software as easy as piecing building blocks together. With Quick-Connect Studio, users can rapidly build a full solution in the cloud and deploy to hardware in under 10 minutes. There is very little upfront learning or investment needed. The cloud compute power provides fast compilation, and the modern GUI reduces the learning curve and promotes project reuse.
Renesas’ Quick-Connect Studio is built on Quick-Connect IoT, a platform of standardised hardware featuring industry-established interfaces such as PMOD, Arduino, and MIKROE. With standard connectors, engineers can mix and match MCUs, MPUs, sensors, and connectivity boards seamlessly. In the future, users will be able to extend and expand beyond Renesas to different partners such as major cloud providers, service integrators, and leaders in the open-source community.
Engineers will benefit from graphically building in the cloud, connecting to real hardware, and easily programming and testing a complete solution. Quick-Connect Studio automatically generates system projects that can be downloaded and imported into Renesas’ e2 studio either as a pre-built binary or full-source code project, enabling users to leverage the full Renesas tool chain.
“Renesas is heavily investing in advancing the digital user experience,” says Chris Allexandre, senior vice president, CSMO and head of the global sales and marketing unit at Renesas. “Quick-Connect Studio exemplifies how Renesas is accelerating the development cycle for engineers, enabling the fast validation and testing of new ideas, and allowing designers to innovate quickly using Renesas as their preferred platform.”
Availability
Quick-Connect Studio is available today and supported by various Quick-Connect IoT development boards spanning MCUs, Connectivity, and Sensors. More development kits, PMODs and peripheral boards will be added continuously to the platform at here.
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