Uppsala, Sweden—April 16, 2014—IAR Systems® today introduces an updated version of its embedded development tools IAR Embedded Workbench® for Renesas RL78. The version includes several new features which further enhance and simplify development of applications based on Renesas low-power RL78 microcontrollers.

In version 1.40 of the complete and high-performance toolchain IAR Embedded Workbench for RL78, support for the C++ feature multiple inheritance is added. This allows developers to define classes based on multiple parents and inherit characteristics and features from them. With support for the __huge data memory attribute, it’s possible to handle more than 64Kbytes of contiguous data. For example, this enables indexing of an array with a larger size than 64 Kbytes.

To make it possible to handle really large integer values, the C99 data type long long is introduced in this version. The long long data type stores extended size integer values as 64-bit and is useful in for example metering applications.

Features to further simplify development of Renesas RL78 include functionality to invoke external analyzers for project files, which is often used as an interface to static analysis tools like PC-lint. Additional integration with external tools is the added custom argument variables which can be used in IAR Embedded Workbench for RL78 when sending arguments to an external build tool.

IAR Systems is the only tool vendor that supports the entire microcontroller portfolio from Renesas, and the company was the first one to offer support for RL78. IAR Systems continuously adds support for new Renesas devices and several are added in this version. Learn more about IAR Embedded Workbench for RL78 at www.iar.com/ewrl78.