Renesas development kits

[Modelworks]

Renesas has a promotion going on where you can get a lot of free stuff.
http://www.renesasrulz.com/community/rx-contest

I entered my information about a month ago and yesterday got a kit in the mail.

The kit comes with the renesas board, two usb cables and a cd with the software. It retails for $112. From what I have seen of it that price is very reasonable.


RX621 MCU @100Mhz - a really impressive processor. Performance wise it is faster than the ARM cortex 3 or 4 at the same speeds.
Youtube link about the RX core
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p38LyDId33I&feature=related

http://www.rxmcu.com/USA/RX62Ngroup.php

Board layout is like this:

Flash issupplied by micron using their new PCM tech. Really interesting stuff

PCM storage element consists of a thin film of chalcogenide contacted
by a resistive heating element. In PCM, the phase change is induced in the memory cell by
highly localized Joule heating caused by an induced current at the material junction. During
a write operation, a small volume of the chalcogenide material is made to change phase.
The phase change is a reversible process, and is modulated by the magnitude of injected
current, the applied voltage, and the duration of the heating pulse.
Omneo™ P5Q PCM combines the benefits of traditional floating gate flash, both NOR-type
and NAND-type, with some of the key attributes of RAM and EEpROM. Like NOR flash and
RAM technology, PCM offers fast random access times. Like NAND flash, PCM has the
ability to write moderately fast. And like RAM and EEpROM, PCM supports bit alterable
writes (overwrite). Unlike flash, no separate erase step is required to change information
from 0 to 1 and 1 to 0. Unlike RAM, however, the technology is nonvolatile with data
retention comparable NOR flash. However, at the current time, PCM technology appears to
have a write cycling endurance better than that of NAND or NOR flash, but less than that of
RAM.
Unlike other proposed alternative memories, Omneo™ P5Q PCM technology uses a
conventional CMOS process with the addition of a few additional layers to form the memory
storage element. Overall, the basic memory manufacturing process used to make PCM is
less complex than that of NAND, NOR or DRAM.

It includes a monochrome LCD display, ethernet, segger.com jtag , just the parts alone will add up to much more than the cost of the kit. I am really glad to see companies start to offer dev kits at reasonable prices instead of the ridiculous prices that some of them charge. Dev kits priced at $1K for a $10 chip is insane. Now if the software tools market would only catch on. The board ships with tools using the Gnu libraries but you have to register to get a key to use them ! . Even the free stuff has stuff attached in the dev world .