Renesas and IAR Systems Announce IEC61508 Safety Compliant Development Tool

Renesas Electronics Europe has teamed up with its software alliance partner IAR Systems AB to offer a development tool for Renesas' 32-bit RX microcontroller platform that facilitates compliance with the safety standard IEC61508. Functional safety is one of the most important features in industrial automation systems today. To ensure functional safety, system developers have to consider development tools as an integral part of the system certification in addition to the normal development. The proof of compliance for the tools increases cost and time of development.

To solve this problem, IAR Systems provides the complete development tool suite IAR Embedded Workbench for RX, which is already certified for creating embedded safety applications. It includes high-performance compiler and debugger tools incorporated in an easy-to-use integrated development environment. The quality assurance measures applied by IAR Systems and the included Safety Manual allow application developers to use IAR Embedded Workbench for RX in safety-related software development for each Safety Integrity Level (SIL) according to IEC 61508. IAR Embedded Workbench for RX is certified by TÃœV SÃœD.

Customers who are planning to use the 32-bit RX microcontroller family in their designs for safety applications can proceed with application software development without needing to consider the normative requirements of the IEC61508 for the build chain. This shortens the development cycle.

"We are glad to be teaming up with IAR Systems as a software alliance partner for the leading embedded development tool chain IAR Embedded Workbench for RX,” said Niels Trapp, Senior Manager at Renesas Electronics Europe. “The certified tool suite helps our customers during the certification process and efficiently supports our RX microcontrollers for safety applications.”

“We have supported customers in different industries developing safety-related functionality for many years, and together with Renesas we now take the offer to the next level,” commented Anders Holmberg, Product Manager for Functional Safety, IAR Systems. “The certified toolchain and the exhaustive functional safety support agreement that comes with it will simplify the certification process for developers of industrial automation systems and ensure their tools investment is protected through the entire product life cycle.”