Installation Procedure

Table of Contents

A. E2 Studio Support

B. PEmicro Cyclone FX Support with Renesas Device Partition Manager (RDPM)

 A. E2 Studio Support

1. Install the PEmicro GDB server for ARM device Plugin

After e² studio is launched, the following steps will install the PEMicro GDB server for ARM devices plug-in.

a. Locate the “Help” tab

b. Select the “Install New Software” option as shown in the screenshot below:

c. In the “Work With” input box, enter the following address:  https://www.pemicro.com/eclipse/updates and hit the keyboard Enter key.

d. In the following dialog click ‘Next’, accept the License, and click Finish.

e. This will install support for PEMicro 's Multilink and Cyclone hardware into e² studio. You will also be allowed to connect all corresponding target devices that are supported by PEMicro hardware. A dialog will pop up prompting you to restart e² studio. Click Yes.

PEMicro debug support has now been added into e² studio.

2. Create a Launch Configuration

The following steps will help you to create a Launch configuration:

a. Open or create the project of your choice.

     i. For example, select the “File” tab in the top left corner and then select New->Renesas C/C++. From here, navigate to the applicable Renesas project depending on your target processor (RA, Synergy, etc) as show in the screenshot below.

     ii. The following screen will appear to create a new Renesas project. Name the project and select the type of project that will be created and click "Next".

     iii. Then select the corresponding ‘FSP Version’, ‘Board’ and “Device’ you wish to work with under the "Device Selection" option, as well as the specific part of the target board categorized by MCU family. Once these are selected, click “Next” and then continue on specifying the type of project you would like to create. The next page will show “Bare Metal – Minimal” example or whichever example(s) is present to get started, then select “Finish”. 

b. Build the project by right-clicking on the project and searching for the “Build Project” option. Alternately, you may click on the project in the Project Explorer popup menu and click the icon with the picture of a hammer on the main button bar.

c. Once you are ready to debug the project for the first time, open the Debug Configurations dialog. This can be done from the main button bar (as highlighted in the figure below) or the Project Explorer popup menu. The Project Explorer popup menu is shown here:

d. This brings up the dialog where launch settings are configured. Normally, you would select the configuration of your choice to edit it. In this case, we have never configured a launch before and need to create a launch configuration. Select Debug As -> Debug Configurations...

e. You should now see “GDB PEMicro Interface Debugging” presented as an option in the Debug Configurations window. Double click this option.

 This will create a GDB PEMicro debug configuration with default settings which need to be adjusted.

f.) Next select the “Debugger” Tab of the Debug Configurations dialog. This brings up launch settings for the currently selected configuration.

g.) Select the PEMicro hardware you are using to interface with the target device (for this web example we will be using the Multilink FX hardware via USB connection).

h.) Next, we need to select the specific microcontroller type to be debugged. This is done by clicking the “Select Device” button which pops up the “Select Target Device” dialog. This dialog shows a tree structure of all supported devices. In this case we want to navigate to “Renesas” -> ”RA2x” -> whichever Renesas RA2 device is being used.

Select the device to be programmed and click the “Select” button. 

k.) The GDB Debug Client also needs to be specified to launch a debug session. There is a panel titled “GDB Client Settings” on the Debugger Tab which has a path to the GDB client executable (provided by Silicon Labs). Click the “Browse...” button and navigate to the proper GDB client executable (usually arm-none-eabi-gdb.exe). In this example, the path is “C:\Renesas\e2_studio\eclipse\plugins\com.pemicro.debug.gdbjtag.pne.expansion_5.1.0.202109011413\win32\gdb\arm-none-eabi-gdb.exe”. Once selected, the path is shown in the “Executable” input box.

There are many settings in this dialog. Refer to the plug-in documentation for these details.

You are now ready to debug. Click the Apply button to save the settings and then the Debug button to launch a debug session.

B. PEmicro Cyclone FX Support with Renesas Device Partition Manager (RDPM)

Enhanced security for Device Lifecycle Management and secure trust zone boundary partitioning is an important aspect of many Renesas devices. Renesas has helpfully allowed a way to program these settings through an interactive GUI or a separate command line tool within e2 Studio .

In order to ensure that Cyclone FX programmers work with these tools, the latest Cyclone LC and Cyclone FX Programmer Installation Software must be downloaded. Please note that the Cyclone installer is made available for both Window and Linux operating systems. The newest Cyclone install will include the necessary source files to successfully interface with Renesas' RDPM tools.

Along with an updated Cyclone installer, the user will need to update to their e2 Studio to minimum build 2023-07. This build will also include the necessary source files within e2 Studio to interface with PEmicro tools.

Once everything is up to date, please open e2 Studio and navigate to the following location using the image provided below.

After opening this, the following GUI should appear, and PEmicro Cyclone FX should be available under "Target MCU connection" if the patch was applied correctly. 

As stated previously, the utility can also be run from the command line in the corresponding DebugComp/RA support folder. In this case, the correct location is:
C:\Users\steven.mcgrath\.eclipse\com.renesas.platform_780075259\DebugComp\RA\DevicePartitionManager
and should be similar in most cases. An example of the command line usage and output is shown below.

The above examples are handled within a Windows operating system, however, the same solution will work under a Linux operating system with the necessary Cyclone FX Linux installers.

PEmicro also provides our own solution to handle DLM and boundary programming through our standalone Image Creation Utility; here is a blogpost with further information regarding this implementation.