MCU families with simple licensing for secure embedded IoT development

Update: June 19, 2021

Renesas Electronics Corporation has announced that customers designing with all mainstream Renesas 32-bit MCU families can now access Microsoft Azure RTOS embedded development suite, and its powerful Azure IoT middleware. The RTOS is integrated and offered out-of-box in the FSP version 3.0 for the company’s RA Family MCUs, and the SSP version 2.0 for Synergy MCUs. The RTOS support for its RX Family is provided through the e2 studio IDE.

The RTOS includes Azure RTOS ThreadX, an advanced real-time operating system intended particularly for deeply embedded applications. Among the multiple benefits it offers are real-time multithreading, inter-thread communication and synchronisation, and memory management. It provides advanced features, including picokernel architecture, preemption-threshold, event chaining, and a strong set of system services.

“We have reached a critical milestone in our collaboration with Microsoft and are excited to be able to offer our customers access to this industry-leading RTOS platform across our 32-bit MCU lines,” said Roger Wendelken, senior vice president in the IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit at Renesas. “We’ve worked hard to ensure this integration enables a seamless developer experience with access to pre-integrated project templates and smart configurators. This integration leverages unique capabilities of our Secure Crypto Engine, enabling a highly robust security foundation.”

“Empowering developers is one of the most effective ways for organisations to unlock innovation and increase time to value,” said Sam George, corporate vice president, Azure IoT at Microsoft Corp. “This is the ambition of the integration of Azure RTOS with Renesas’ FSP and SSP software packages — this step forward marries Renesas’ leading development experience with the secure, scalable, and open edge-to-cloud IoT capabilities of our Azure IoT platform. There’s never been a better time to build on Renesas’ 32-bit family of MCUs.”