 Mobile phones and digital home appliances exhibit continued rapid growth, in response to performance gains and increasingly advanced functions. In the midst of this growth, however, product manufacturers have seen a number of crucial engineering issues gradually come to the fore.
There are two main challenges, each of which is significant by itself and also complicates the other. Ever-shorter product cycles are mandating faster development times, while at the same time a growing number of product types and increasingly advanced functions are causing software development processes to become more complex. The SoC technologies being used to achieve more compact, lower-priced products do help ease hardware design. Yet the limited time that can be allotted to software development and evaluation testing still presents a big problem. A solution is needed that can speed up product development and ensure that new products meet user requirements and can be delivered to the market quickly and efficiently.
At Renesas Electronics, we focus our energies primarily on serving the mobile phone, automotive, and computer A/V markets. Having contributed significantly to the expansions of these fields, we now offer a fundamental solution to the engineering issues that our customers are facing — one that it will contribute to the optimization of development processes as a whole. We are basing our approach on the concept of a flexible "Mother Platform" that supports and accelerates the development of other platforms tailored to the requirements of specific fields. Our EXREAL Platform™ is the embodiment of this revolutionary concept. It can dramatically reduce development time for software and SoC components in diverse markets.
The EXREAL Platform introduces innovative technologies that enable effortless connections to achieve convergence. It facilitates and synergistically enables the horizontal integration of the R&D expertise and assets Renesas and our partners have acquired delivering solutions for various core applications. This platform also provides mechanisms for evaluation testing.
The Special Feature section of this Edge newsletter begins with an interview with Satoru Ito, President and CEO of Renesas Electronics Corp., who explains the technology strategy of the EXREAL Platform and the merits it offers to customers. A three-part article offering more detail on the platform follows, written with the help of Atsushi Hasegawa from the System Core Technology Department. Parts 1 and 2 cover the issues that drove the development of the EXREAL Platform and the key concepts used in its design. Part 3 describes how the mother platform can be applied.
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