IAR, a global leader in embedded software development solutions, announced on the 30th that it has officially released the latest version of its toolchain for Renesas' RX and RL78 architectures.

This update provides significant efficiency and flexibility to developers of microcontrollers (MCUs) for industrial, automotive, and consumer applications.

The latest versions of the IAR toolchain, RX 5.20 and RL78 5.20, are fully integrated with the IAR Embedded Development Platform, enabling developers to more seamlessly build CI/CD pipelines, DevOps workflows, and cross-platform development environments.

In particular, compatibility with major DevOps tools such as GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, and Kubernetes provides great advantages in terms of collaboration and automation.

IAR has had a partnership with Renesas Electronics for over 40 years, and this update now supports over 4,000 Renesas MCUs, giving developers a broad range of options across the RA, RX, RL78, RZ, RH850, and RISC-V product families.

“The RX and RL78 remain core architectures in areas where power efficiency and reliability are critical,” said Thomas Anderson, IAR’s chief product officer. “This toolchain update provides a modern development process while maintaining performance and standards compliance.” “We will support you to implement it,” he said.

The IAR platform boasts wide compatibility with various operating systems such as Windows, Ubuntu, and Red Hat, as well as Docker, virtual machines, and self-hosted runners, greatly improving the collaboration efficiency and infrastructure flexibility of distributed development teams.

“IAR is a key partner for our RX and RL78 architectures, and their latest platform capabilities provide developers with greater DevOps integration, cross-platform flexibility, and safety certification support,” said Frank Rocheda of Renesas.

Additionally, this toolchain supports global safety certification standards such as IEC 61508, ISO 26262, and IEC 62304, and can reduce the burden even in areas with strict regulatory requirements such as automotive, industrial, and medical fields.

Future expansion of the safety certification version will further enhance the ability to respond to complex system certification and approval procedures.

With this feature improvement, IAR is implementing a development environment integrated with various architectures such as Arm (RA, RZ), RISC-V, and Renesas-specific MCUs, contributing to maintaining code quality, shortening the time to market, and reducing development costs.