Renesas rolls automotive gateway starter kit

Renesas Electronics has unveiled the R-Car S4 Starter Kit development board for automotive gateway systems. The low-cost development board facilitates building software using the Renesas R-Car S4 system on chip (SoC).

R-Car S4 automotive gateway Starter Kit (Source: Renesas Electronics)

The SoC performance and communication features span cloud communication and safe vehicle control. Compared to the existing R-Car S4 reference board, the new starter kit is less expensive and is a readily available option. Designers can use the new kit to begin evaluating car servers, connected gateways and connectivity modules for rapid application development.

While the S4 was “well received” as a gateway SoC, customers wanted an inexpensive development environment that could be more widely used across design teams, Renesas said. The R-Car S4 solution enables designers re-use of up to 88 percent of software code developed for third-generation R-Car SoCs and RH850 MCU applications. The software supports real-time cores with various drivers and basic software such as Linux BSP and hypervisors.

Available now, the R-Car S4 Starter Kit includes interfaces such as Ethernet TSN switch and CAN FD, and memory, including 4 GB of LPDDR4, 128 GB of Universal Flash Storage (UFS) and 64 MB of quad SPI flash memory. Users can expand peripheral functions by using expansion connectors and can also customize the hardware.

Renesas also offers the R-Car S4 Whitebox SDK open-source automotive development environment for the R-Car S4, which works with the Starter Kit. The SDK consists of free-of-charge software without “complicated” license agreements. It includes sample software, test programs and resource monitoring tools for over-the-air software updates, intrusion prevention system and intrusion detection system for network security, allowing for various prototyping and evaluation. Users can use the sample software as a foundation to develop their own applications.

The R-Car S4 Starter Kit is available from major Renesas distributors. The R-Car S4 Whitebox SDK will be available by the end of August.