Collaboration with Microsoft to accelerate connected vehicle development

Renesas Electronics Corporation is collaborating with Microsoft to accelerate the development of connected vehicles. Renesas’ R-Car Starter Kit, based on the company’s R-Car automotive SoC, is now offered as a development environment for the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform (MCVP). MCVP consolidates a partner ecosystem with a horizontal platform of Azure cloud, AI and edge services on top of which mobility companies can produce customer-facing solutions. The company has also been certified for Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Edge.

MCVP aids mobility companies to accelerate the delivery of digital services across vehicle provisioning, two-way network connectivity, and continuous over-the-air updates of containerised functionality. Within the Renesas development environment, customers can utilise MCVP components and Renesas Board Support Package (BSP) in addition to the multimedia package for R-Car. Also, the R-Car Starter Kit is certified as an Azure IoT Edge device.

The company's development environment enables customers to produce software in the cloud or on a PC, and then install it on an R-Car SoC to deliver verification before implementing it in applications for vehicles or embedded mobility devices. Recognising potential implementation issues early in the development of connected vehicles makes the design process more efficient. The collaboration with Microsoft will allow the company to advance the development of connected vehicles, stimulate the production of MaaS businesses, and add to the establishment of on-demand businesses quickly.

“The burden of software development has become a major issue for connected systems and services developers,” said Naoki Yoshida, vice president 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. I am delighted that our joint collaboration will combine Renesas’ extensive track record in the automotive field with Microsoft’s expertise in connectivity, and help customers accelerate the system development process.”

“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, general manager Azure Mobility at Microsoft.