Renesas Electronics Accelerates Industrial Ethernet Application Development with New RZ/N1 Solution Kit

Renesas Electronics announced the availability of the new RZ/N1 microprocessor (MPU) Solution Kit designed to support various industrial network applications including programmable logic controllers (PLCs), intelligent network switches, gateways, operator terminals and remote I/O solutions.

The new RZ/N1 Solution Kit is a complete development package that includes the hardware and software to enable faster prototyping of leading industrial Ethernet protocols such as EtherCAT®, EtherNet/IP™, ETHERNET Powerlink®, PROFINET®, Sercos®, and CANopen®, thereby accelerating development and saving up to six months of industrial network protocol integration into customers’ applications.

The new kit includes a CPU development board based on the RZ/N1S MPU. In addition, a comprehensive software package is included with all the drivers and middleware, sample protocol stacks, U-Boot and Linux®-based BSP, a unique inter-processor communication software, and even a user-friendly PinMuxing tool that can generate C-code header files that removes the complexity of pin configuration. The various software and sample code provides customers with a complete set of tools and frameworks to build their own application without any additional up-front costs or complexity.

Key features of the new RZ/N1 Solution Kit

Enhanced operating system flexibility

Developers can now evaluate using the operating system (OS) ThreadX® for the applications subsystem, in addition to Linux that is already supported by the RZ/N1. This enables system developers to choose an OS depending on their specific application requirements. Both OS options support the leading industrial Ethernet protocols that have been implemented on RZ/N1.

Linux: A widely used OS with a very large knowledge base community. For Yocto based Linux development, Renesas provides the respective Yocto recipes to build the Linux, U-Boot and root file system. Using Qt abstracted set of APIs, GUI applications can also be developed and ported to different targets.

ThreadX: Renesas provides a sample reference port of Express Logic’s X-Ware IoT platform powered by ThreadX on the application subsystem. ThreadX is designed specifically for deeply embedded, real-time, and IoT applications. It provides advanced scheduling, communication, synchronization, timer, memory management, and interrupt management facilities.

Enables PLC programming compatible with IEC 61131-3 by CODESYS®

The new solution kit allows evaluation of CODESYS®, a leading hardware independent IEC 61131-3 development system for programming and creating programmable logic controller (PLC) applications. Among others it supports Industrial Ethernet master stacks for EtherCAT, EtherNet/IP, Sercos, CANOpen and PROFINET. Furthermore, the embedded LCD controller featured in the RZ/N1D makes great use of the CODESYS® target visualization tool, enabling product development with graphical visualization screens. Having CODESYS support enables the device to be either a protocol slave device but also as a master, which highlights the flexibility of the RZ/N1 Group MPUs.