Development For Next Generation Car Infotainment Systems Processor Enabled By CodeScape Toolset

Leeds, England, 19th August 2004: CodeScape, the specialist SuperH™ series embedded tools arm of Imagination Technologies, today announced support for Renesas Technology Corp's SH7780 high-performance processor for use in car infotainment systems.

Increasingly preferred for application development in a range of fields including car information systems and networking appliances, CodeScape is now available to developers using the SH7780 processor and delivers the experience and rich functionality, gained over a decade of concentrating on supporting SuperH cores, to this latest member of the product range. CodeScape supports the complete development cycle including hardware bring-up with ROM-less boot and hardware assisted debug, firmware development and OS porting, OS-aware application development, and performance analysis. The development environment includes seamlessly integrated software tools and hardware interfaces to fully exploit the on-chip debug capabilities of the SH7780.

CodeScape's rich toolset is built around a powerful source-level debugger and extends to graphical data visualisation, comprehensive scripting, and many other advanced debug and development features. CodeScape closely integrates with tools from Renesas, GNU (included), and others to ensure full use of the debug information they generate.

Francois-Xavier Godet, SH4 Product Marketing, Renesas Europe Automotive Business Unit, says: "Automotive customers will value CodeScape's solution for its long term support commitment to the SuperH roadmap. We are delighted that this superior tool solution now supports the new SH4A Core, which is standard in all new car infotainment systems products such as the SH7770 and SH7780."

The DASH4A Development Interface for the SH4A series provides complete low-level debug support, such as ROM-less boot, and high performance communications channels with the target. It is fully networkable and uses the H-UDI to communicate with the target at up to 1.5Mbytes/s and via Ethernet with the host at up to 1Mbyte/s. The DASH4A can be used with the supplied scripting system and/or DLLs for low-level activities such as production line testing and commissioning of systems, or it can be used with the CodeScape debugger for product development.

Harman/Becker Automotive Systems has been using CodeScape products on a worldwide basis for many years, and it is now an early customer for the Renesas SH7780.

Thomas Erforth, Hardware Development, Harman/Becker Automotive Systems GmbH, says: "To ensure that our products have leading edge features while remaining cost effective, we always need to be using the latest generation of processors and we also need development tools that can both reduce our time to market and ensure the higher possible quality end product. We have been using CodeScape development tools for many years and have found that the feature set and the excellent technical support are exactly what we need."

Ian Oliver, VP of Development, CodeScape, says: "The whole in-car sector is expanding rapidly and Renesas has very well-targeted products such as the SH7780. As usual, we have worked closely with Renesas and their major customers and we're pleased to now offer full support for the SH7780 in our toolset, as part of our ongoing commitment to the SH4A range."

CodeScape includes software tools, hosted on either Windows or Linux, and hardware interfaces to fully exploit the on-chip debug capabilities of each supported processor. Processors supported by CodeScape include over 20 different SH devices across the SH-2, SH-2e, SH-DSP, SH-3, SH3-DSP, SH-4 and the new SH-4A families.

CodeScape products are available from www.codescape.com or from Renesas distributors worldwide.