Japanese electronics giant Renesas has created an online, cloud-based IoT system design platform that lets users graphically build hardware and software to validate prototypes and accelerate product development.

Today’s development cycle is cumbersome – engineers research and define the project, collect device information and requirements, layout hardware, develop software, test, and iterate until the product is ready to release to market. This process is typically done sequentially, and each step takes a significant amount of time. Often the software development phase consumes the most engineering power and ultimately becomes the biggest bottleneck.

With Renesas’ Quick-Connect Studio, engineers can perform hardware and software development simultaneously. This is a shift in the industry, enabling designers to build software immediately with the ability to reconfigure and test product ideas. This yields time savings and reduces risk as engineers can validate designs before committing to hardware layout.

Quick-Connect Studio lets engineers graphically drag and drop device and subsystem blocks on the cloud. After placing each block, users can generate, compile and build software automatically, a shift towards the no-code paradigm of development. This makes building production-level software as easy as piecing building blocks together.

With Quick-Connect Studio, users can rapidly build a full project in the cloud and deploy to hardware in under ten minutes. There is little upfront learning or investment needed. The cloud compute power provides fast compilation, and the GUI reduces the learning curve and promotes project reuse.

Quick-Connect Studio is built on the Quick-Connect IoT platform of standard hardware featuring interfaces such as PMod, Arduino and Mikroe. With standard connectors, engineers can mix and match MCUs, MPUs, sensors and connectivity boards seamlessly. In the future, users will be able to extend and expand beyond Renesas to different partners such as cloud providers, service integrators and the open-source community.

Engineers can benefit from graphically building in the cloud, connecting to real hardware, and easily programming and testing a complete project. Quick-Connect Studio automatically generates system projects that can be downloaded and imported into Renesas’ e² studio either as a pre-built binary or full-source code project, enabling users to leverage the full Renesas tool chain.

“Renesas is heavily investing in advancing the digital user experience,” said Chris Allexandre, senior vice president at Renesas.“Quick-Connect Studio exemplifies how Renesas is accelerating the development cycle for engineers, enabling the fast validation and testing of new ideas, and allowing designers to innovate quickly using Renesas as their preferred platform.”

Quick-Connect Studio is available today and supported by various Quick-Connect IoT development boards spanning MCUs, connectivity and sensors. More development kits, PMods and peripheral boards will be added to the platform.

There will be a live demonstration of Quick-Connect Studio at next week’s Embedded World exhibition in Nuremberg in Hall 1, Stand 234. At the show, attendees will have the opportunity to watch how a full system prototype can be built in minutes.