Renesas Announces New R-Car S4 Starter Kit, A Development Board for Automotive Gateway Systems

By Tiera Oliver

Associate Editor

Embedded Computing Design

July 12, 2023

News

Renesas Announces New R-Car S4 Starter Kit, A Development Board for Automotive Gateway Systems

TOKYO, Japan ― Renesas announced the R-Car S4 Starter Kit, a new low-cost, readily available development board for automotive gateway systems, car servers, connectivity modules and more, for rapid application development.

The new kit is also available for building software using the Renesas R-Car S4 system on chip (SoC). The SoC is designed to provide high computing performance, as well as communication features for both cloud communication and safe vehicle control. Per the company, the new starter kit is a less-expensive option compared to the existing R-Car S4 Reference Board, which provides a full-scale development environment including an evaluation board and software.

The R-Car S4 Starter Kit includes R-Car S4 interfaces such as Ethernet TSN switch and CAN FD, and memory such as 4GB(Gigabyte) of LPDDR4, 128GB of UFS (Universal Flash Storage), and 64MB(Megabyte) of Quad SPI flash memory. Users can also expand peripheral functions by utilizing expansion connectors and customizing the hardware for individual needs.

Renesas provides the R-Car S4 Whitebox SDK, an open-source automotive development environment for the R-Car S4, which can be combined with the R-Car S4 Starter Kit. The SDK consists of FoC (Free of Charge) software and includes sample software, test programs, and resource monitoring tools for OTA (Over-The-Air software updates), IPS (Intrusion Prevention System), and IDS (Intrusion Detection System) for network security.

The R-Car S4 Whitebox SDK will be available by the end of August. The R-Car S4 Starter Kit is available from major distributors or via a Renesas local sales representative.

For more information, please visit: https://www.renesas.com/R-Car-S4-StarterKit or https://www.renesas.com/whitebox-sdk

Tiera Oliver, Associate Editor for Embedded Computing Design, is responsible for web content edits, product news, and constructing stories. She also assists with newsletter updates as well as contributing and editing content for ECD podcasts and the ECD YouTube channel. Before working at ECD, Tiera graduated from Northern Arizona University where she received her B.S. in journalism and political science and worked as a news reporter for the university’s student led newspaper, The Lumberjack.

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