January 11th, 2011 – Uppsala, Sweden. IAR Systems today announced it will extend its range of Renesas Electronics microcontroller (MCU) support to include its latest low power RL78 family of MCUs. Already providing an extensive tool chain for all Renesas Electronics MCU devices, the new RL78 MCUs will use the same integrated development environment (IDE), IAR Embedded Workbench. Using the same environment makes it easier for a developer to switch between Renesas Electronics’ MCU targets, reuse code between projects and reduce project risks.

“Our customers continue to benefit from the close cooperation we have with IAR Systems”, comments Mohammed Dogar, Assistant Manager, Technical Marketing, Renesas Electronics Europe. “Their collaboration with Renesas Electronics, and their dedication to support all of our MCU devices result in the timely provision of reliable tools that are optimized for our new architectures. IAR Systems consistently delivers on that goal.”

By providing a single tool chain for well over 5,000 different MCU devices across 10 product families IAR Systems believes that this makes IAR Embedded Workbench the preferred tool chain of choice for software development on Renesas Electronics’ MCUs. In addition, IAR Embedded Workbench provides support for both the Renesas Electronics’ E1 and IECUBE emulator debuggers making debugging of advanced projects more predictable and the end products more reliable.

Respected by embedded developers for its efficient code generation, and that the compiler contains both generic global and low-level chip-specific optimizations, IAR Embedded Workbench developments run faster and require less flash memory.