Renesas and Microsoft collaborate to accelerate connected vehicle development

Renesas Electronics Corporation, a supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, announced its collaboration with Microsoft to accelerate the development of connected vehicles.

Renesas’ R-Car Starter Kit, based on Renesas’ R-Car automotive system-on-chip (SoC), is now available as a development environment for the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform (MCVP).

MCVP combines a partner ecosystem with a horizontal platform of Azure cloud, AI, and edge services on top of which mobility companies can build customer-facing solutions. Renesas has also been certified for Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Edge.

Additionally, it helps mobility companies accelerate the delivery of digital services across vehicle provisioning, two-way network connectivity, and continuous over-the-air updates of containerized functionality. Within the Renesas development environment, customers can use MCVP components and Renesas Board Support Package (BSP) in addition to multimedia package for R-Car.

What’s more: the R-Car Starter Kit is certified as an Azure IoT Edge device.

The Renesas development environment allows customers to develop software in the Cloud or on a PC, and then install it on an R-Car SoC to perform a verification before implementing it in applications for vehicles or embedded mobility devices. Identifying potential implementation issues early in the development of connected vehicles makes the design process more efficient.

“The burden of software development has become a major issue for connected systems and services developers,” said Naoki Yoshida, VP of Automotive Digital Products Marketing Division at Renesas. “Using our Azure IoT-certified R-Car Starter Kit as the development environment for MCVP will allow customers to focus resources on software development that will deliver their own value-add services.”

The collaboration with Microsoft will enable Renesas to advance the development of connected vehicles, stimulate the creation of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) businesses, and contribute to the establishment of on-demand businesses quickly.

“Our collaboration with Renesas will help our mutual customers speed up their system development and enable them to deliver innovative mobility experiences more quickly,” said Tara Prakriya, GM Azure Mobility at Microsoft.