Hi all. I am currently researching the Renesas M16C62 part for a product, but it seems like all their sales distributors do not stock the part. It does not bode well for me since I have to guarantee availability as well as functionality. Does anyone have some suggestions on a good distributor in US or Japan?
Am I looking for the correct part or is this part being phased out and a new one is coming in?
Thanks for all the past help this board has offered me. It has saved me a lot of time and frustration. Chris
I'm designing a project now for a huge customer, using the M16C/62P family, specifically the M30624F8PFP (64K flash, in single chip mode) My distributor is Arrow.com. The 62P is the 3rd die shrink in the family, just starting production this year. The 62A and 62N are still available, about 2 years old now. I think it's a well supported product. The technical and sales support I've received from Renesas engineers, reps, and distributors was a little slow to start with, but has ramped up and is excellent now (especially as my inquiries have became more focused) The performance is a little better, and price point is a LOT better than the part we are using now, the Hitachi H8/2357. The 62P is full of peripherals, and it's instruction set is optimized for C stack handling and bit operations. We are using the IAR Embedded Workbench V.2.11A, and the Renesas ICE PC7501.
Of course selecting any part depends entirely on your application and cost restraints, but we are gearing up to use this part (unless something derails us) and are confident that the supply chain will deliver thru the entire product cycle, at least a few years long.
Thanks for your valuable input Coat. If it is possible, I am curious about the debug toolchain you are using. Is the Renesas ICE PC7501 a JTAG debugger? Also, does it use C-SPY on IAR? Last question, do you know the approximate cost of the ICE? Thanks very much. I am kind of leaning towards it right now. I need to locate some parts though because all distributors I talked to claim to be out of the part. Chris
The PC7501 is a traditional ICE with a pod that replaces the entire CPU for debugging. You can read about it and other Renesas development tools on the Renesas website:
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The cost of the emulator and pod for the 62P is around $8000 USD (not allowed to say what we pay)
But, there are cheaper (almost free!) alternatives to using the PC7501. The M16C family doesnt have JTAG as such, but it does have an address-matching breakpoint unit built in, with debugging thru a serial port. Using one of the debug "monitors" (either the C-SPY from IAR, or the PD30 from Renesas) that you link into your code, you run the debugger front-end on your PC. You can set up to 6 hardware breakpoints using the capabilties built in to the CPU, adding hardly any overhead. It's really quite good, if that's all you need.
If you are like us, doing complex real-time control in a high volume product, where safety is an issue (and where a product recall would kill you) then you really must invest in, and carefully use the PC7501. One of the time-saving optimization features of the M16C family is that it has an instruction queue, where it reads in the next 4 instructions while it's processing the first one, in anticipation that they might get executed (unless a branch happens), so you have to be careful not to do any accurate timing loops in software, always do them with one of the hardware timers (there are 11 of them!) So the cycle counter in the PC7501 is the only accurate way to see exactly what the timing is, short of instrumenting your code with writes to a port pin and measuring it with an oscilloscope. The PC7501 also lets you set breakpoints on a variety of conditions, or to capture a trace of what was exectued, or to see which lines of code were covered (we have to stop execution to set variables to artificially force exection of every possible line of code, just to see what happens) and lots of other features.
There aren't a lot of alternatives to the PC7501, it's the most recent and up to date tool of any I have found, but you can check out the ADViCE from Yokogawa, the M16C from Nohau, and the HyperStac from Sophia Systems (Sophia is owned by Nohau now). I like the PC7501 because it's a recent addition to the Renesas tool chain (replacing the older 4701U) and they are releasing updates to the debugger (one just came out Sept 1/03) so the support is present. And if you start with the cheaper PD30 debug monitor, then move to the PC7501, you are still using the same debugger interface on the PC you are familiar with, nothing to relearn! (except for the additional features).
If you are having trouble getting parts from the distributor, place a request for some samples, and meanwhile you can order an Evaluation Kit, it's a great way to get started, only around $100, and at least you can try out some stuff while your boards are getting made and the samples are on the way. (I see from browsing around on the Renesas website they've recently added a newer "Starter Kit", dont know anything about it ) The evaluation kit comes with a limited Renesas toolchain. The compiler is either code size limited, or unlimited but with a 120 day lifespan, I forget which, but I have seen both. We chose the IAR toolchain after a lot of benchmark testing with Sieve, Dhrystone, and our own application code comparing it to Renesas. For now we are making a daughter card for development purposes with our application circuts on it to attatch to the connector on the Evaluation Kit, before designing our production boards.
I h> Thanks for your valuable input Coat. If it is possible, I am curious
Hi Coat. Thanks for your advice. I think it is swaying me towards the Renesas (Mitsubishi) M16C26 micro. Maybe you should contract for them to receive commission when you help with sales. Anyways, I am going to purchase a starter kit first and download the demo of IAR for the chip. If things go well, then I will probably go with the Renesas as opposed to the other chips I am looking into (MOT 68HCS12, Atmel ATMega64, Zilog EZ80F93). Anyways, hopefully I can end my painful trek of comparing micros soon. It is too damn time consuming to do this. I wish someone could just have a database that compares all microcontrollers known to man at once. Chris
omg yes, I wouldn't want to take anything away from Tasking by neglecting to mention them. Sorry about that. Tasking is also very excellent! Unfortunately for us, we had very limited time to do our evaluation and make a decision, and now we are committed to IAR for this product, for better or worse. I wish I had a chance to evaluate Tasking against Renesas and IAR when I had the chance.
Years ago I used the BSO compiler for the 8051, I believe it was, around the time when BSO merged with Tasking, so I have not been keeping up with the Tasking offerings. But, Tasking toolchain support for Renesas is there! For example, when you open up your Renesas debugger, it asks you if you're using a Renesas, IAR, or Tasking generated object file! That's what I call compatibility! Also, Tasking is now bundling the CodeWright editor as the front end of their IDE, which is awesome! Codewright is my editor of choice, but I had to buy the standalone version from Borland, and then I had to fill in all the batch calls to the IAR compiler myself.
Another reason why IAR and Tasking are great is that they both have very responsive technical support. For example, when I was evaluating IAR, I noticed they didn't handle bit operations the best way possible in some cases: They did read-modify-write where they could have used bit ops... In 4 weeks they came out with a new release that fixed the problem! They rewrote all the SFR headers to take advantage of the new scheme too! Crazy amazing! Now IAR beat Renesas in our benchmark. hehe! And if Tasking is still anything like I remember them, they are every bit as responsive as IAR is. Unfortunately with Renesas, it seems if you have issues with their toolchain, the request has to filter back to Japan for consideration before you get action. Well, that's the way it seems.So by all means please consider Tasking too! (Especially if you don't already have the CodeWright editior, it rocks!)
Hi Jan and Coat. Thanks for your input and all your help. Also, I must agree with you, Coat. I use Codewright all the time and it is by far one of the best editors I have used.
I still have a question regarding the M16 chain. I have been searching high and low for the development board so I can evaluate the chip. I already have the IAR IDE demo installed on my computer and have played around with it. The IAR rep said that I can request an extension once I get the actual hardware. However, I have yet to locate the development board. I checked both Arrow and Avnet for the part number listed on the Renesas site for their Starter Kit 2 board. It is part of the M16/C62 family. The part number I used was:
M3A-0654G01/G02
However both listed the part unknown. It is getting down to the wire and I need to port the design soon. Is this the part number of the starter kit you have gotten? The IAR website also does not list this part number in their supported hardware platforms for their ROM debugger.
Chris, this used to be the MSA 0654 starter kit board of Mitsubishi (now Resesas).
It is equipped with a M16C62 CPU. Do not worry about the number. A long as the M16C62 is on it it's all the same anyway. Mitsubishi (now Renesas) also has a neat little board: the Three Diamonds. You can get it in different flavors: with thje M16C62A, the M16C6N (CAN derivative) and the M16C62P (newer 24Mhz derivative with even more RAM and flash on chip).
Setup is different for these derivatives. Mitsubishi supplies ROM monitors with all these boards. TASKING has a ROM monitor implemented in C that comes along with the toolchain - for all derivatives.
ragards /jan
Chris schrieb in im Newsbeitrag: bjgo7c$at4$ snipped-for-privacy@news01db.so-net.ne.jp...
There is more than one kind of kit for the M16C/62P from Renesas.. You = inquired about a Starter Kit-2 part number M3A-0654G01/G02. This part = just recently showed up on the Renesas website (Aug 25) The original = starter kit which is quite different, is part number MSV1632/62P-SKP... = Renesas just today stripped the remaining references to the MSV off = their website, but I'll bet the distributor will be happy to try and = order one for you.
The older kit has a lot of features on it.. 2 line LCD display, EEPROM, =
4 buttons, a pot, 2 serial ports with driver, It doubles as a Kit for = the 80 series cpu as well, it has a footprint for that chip. And a 150 = pin DIN expansion connector (extra pins for the 80 series chip). RC = reset circuit.
The new kit has two 7-segment displays instead of LCD. 96 pin expansion = connector (not populated), 3 switches, a pot. It has a proper reset = chip instead of an RC.
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