Renesas Electronics, the global semiconductor solution provider, today announced the launch of a new development board for the automotive gateway system - R-Car S4 Starter Kit. As a low-cost and easy-to-use development board, it is used for the software development of Rexa R-Car S4 System on Chip (SoC), which provides high computing performance and a series of communication functions for cloud communication and safe vehicle control. Compared to the existing R-Car S4 reference board, the new entry-level kit is a lower cost and easy-to-use choice, building a complete development environment that includes evaluation boards and software. Engineers can easily start preliminary evaluations of applications such as automotive servers, internet gateways, and connection modules using the new kit, enabling rapid application development.

Takeshi Fuse, director of marketing and business development of Renesas Electronics High-performance computing, simulation and power solutions group, said: "R-Car S4 SoC has been adopted by many customers as a gateway SoC to support the evolution of E/E architecture. At the same time, customers need a low-cost development environment that can be widely used in their design teams, and this development board can meet customer needs. We believe that it can help customers accelerate product development."

The R-Car S4 entry-level kit includes basic R-Car S4 interfaces such as Ethernet TSN switches and CAN FD, as well as 4GB (gigabyte) LPDDR4, 128GB UFS (universal flash memory), and 64MB (megabyte) Quad SPI flash memory. In addition, users can easily expand peripheral functions by using expansion connectors and customize hardware according to individual needs.

In addition, Reza also provides the R-Car S4 Whitebox SDK - as an open source automotive development environment for R-Car S4, which can be used in conjunction with the R-Car S4 starter kit. This SDK is composed of FoC (free) software and can be easily used without the need for complex license agreements. The SDK includes sample software, testing programs, resource monitoring tools for OTA (cloud download), as well as IPS (intrusion prevention system) and IDS (intrusion detection system) for network security, which can be used for various prototype designs and evaluations. Users can develop their own applications based on sample software. This kit shortens the development cycle and reduces power consumption, thereby reducing the impact on the environment.