Anyone Can Easily Start, Introducing Renesas‘ New Development Environment R-Car S4 Whitebox SDK

PublishTime： 2023-02-10 Article Source：Renesas Blogs

The automotive industry is developing around the concept of SDV (Software Defined Vehicle) and connected technologies, which connect vehicles to each other and various infrastructures and services through the Internet, playing an important role as the foundation. Application development for connected/gateway services will be getting more attention in the future. Have you encountered challenges such as the following?

● Want to try devices but can’t start easily due to a troublesome contract

● Want to realize a quick time-to-market but the prototype cannot shift to commercialization smoothly

● In addition to development using a simulation environment, want to start developing early on an actual board

In order to solve these problems, Renesas has prepared a new Development Environment "R-Car S4 Whitebox SDK" for connected/gateway applications. Also, Renesas presented it at the AGL booth at CES 2023, which was held in Las Vegas, USA a few days ago. We met a lot of visitors and it had a huge ripple effect. In this article, we will introduce the features and convenience of the R-Car S4 Whitebox SDK.

What's R-Car S4 Whitebox SDK?

R-Car S4 Whitebox SDK accelerates attractive application development for connected/gateway services. It has the following three features, enabling customers to evaluate R-Car devices and start value-added application development early, and contributing to time to market.

● Flexibility with open-source software and easy trial with FoC (Free of Charge) license

● Scalability by collaborating with many R-Car Consortium partners’ ecosystems

● Usability through use-case oriented all-in-one package

Feature 1: Customizable full software stack (Flexibility)

The Whitebox SDK consists of all open-source software. Therefore, users can easily get started and avoid license issues. Also, Renesas positively contributes to OSS community/upstream activity and keeps up with the latest environment by timely maintenance so that users can always use the latest functions.

The R-Car S4 has three types of CPU cores: Cortex-A55, Cortex-R52, and G4MH which is Renesas' original CPU that is also installed in RH850. We support Xen hypervisor and Linux as guest OS on Cortex-A55. And G4MH supporting software is not only TOPPERS/ATK2, which is a real-time OS, but also SafeG-Auto, which is an MCU hypervisor. In addition to that, we support Zephyr and Trampoline OS on Cortex-R52. The TOPPERS/ATK2 and the Trampoline OS are open-source software based on AUTOSAR specifications; users can start application development on these real-time OSs and smoothly shift developed applications to commercial AUTOSAR OS.

Feature 2: Multiple choice and replaceable with ecosystem (Scalability)

The Whitebox SDK has high software compatibility and is vendor agnostic since it consists of open-source software. This is highly compatible with the various solutions of more than 250 R-Car Consortium partners, which is Renesas's strength. Therefore, users can freely combine and use any of them for commercialization. In short, even the same solution can be selected from multiple partner solutions, and it is possible for customers to select the solution that best suits their products.

Feature 3: Package solution with use-cases and resource monitoring (Usability)

R-Car S4 Whitebox SDK includes sample applications such as SOTA (Software updates Over The Air) / FOTA (Firmware update Over The Air) and IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) / IDS (Intrusion Detection System), and test programs, resource monitoring tools and the guideline as an all-in-one package. Therefore, users can do a trial and test for connected/gateway functions. Also resource monitoring improves usability by visualizing the performance of the R-Car S4 such as CPU load, communication performance between different CPUs, and routing performance.

Summary

We hope you enjoyed this introduction to the features and convenience of the R-Car S4 Whitebox SDK. If you are interested in the R-Car S4 Whitebox SDK, you can get its software and technical documents at www.renesas.com/whitebox-sdk.

Renesas released R-Car S4 Whitebox SDK Ver1.0 at the end of November, and Renesas plans to expand the software continuously.

*All names of products or services mentioned in this article are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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