Renesas Electronics America Announces the Winners of Its RX MCU Design Contest

Renesas Electronics America Inc. presented Thomas Alldread with top honors as the winner of its inaugural RX MCU Design Contest in recognition of his NimbleSig III RF Analyzer project. Renesas confirmed the final judging results and unveiled the winners during a ceremony at Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) Silicon Valley this week. Entries were judged based on a combination of usefulness, technical merit, cost effectiveness, documentation/video, originality and public input.

Joining Thomas Alldread in the RX MCU Design Contest top three winners are second-place winner Jingxi Zhang for his RxECG-Silverlight Web Server for ECG Monitoring System project and third-place winner Matt Pratt for The Brewbot, an automated beer brewing system. Rounding out the top eight are Walter Baker, Jeri Ellsworth, Michael Hamilton, Mike Rosing and Theodor Stana. Renesas Electronics America awarded $5,000 for first place; $3,000 for second place; $1,000 for third place; and five honorable mentions of $500 each. To see all the contest entries, visit Renesas Rulz.com.

"We have been very impressed by the level of creativity and design quality demonstrated by all of the entries, and extend appreciation to everyone who participated in the RX MCU Design Contest,” said Rob Dautel, Senior Manager, Ecosystems, Consumer & Industrial Business Unit, Renesas Electronics America. "As the leading worldwide microcontroller supplier, we recognize the importance of global design innovation, partnership and support for success, particularly in the embedded world. The Renesas RX MCU Design Contest is an example of the commitment from Renesas Electronics and our alliance partners to foster an industry culture of innovation and partnership.”

Encouraging embedded design creativity and competition, the RX MCU Design Contest featuring the RX family of 32-bit MCUs launched at the Renesas Developers Conference on October 13, 2010, and ran through March 27, 2011, garnering enthusiastic participation from across the North American, European and Asian regions. Renesas was joined by several members of its Alliance Partner community, including CMX Systems, IAR Systems, Micrium, Micron, Redpine Signals, RoweBots, SEGGER and Total Phase, many of whom sponsored their own contest prizes, as well as additional awards for the design contest’s weekly challenges.

About the Renesas RX62N RDK

The RX62N RDK integrates best-in-class products from several Renesas Electronics partners to create an extremely robust solution that helps reduce design and interoperability uncertainty for designers while delivering desired performance and time-to-market turnaround. Among the best-in-class components on the RDK board are devices from Analog Devices, Epson, Micron, National Semiconductor, Okaya, SEGGER and Total Phase.

About the Renesas RX Development Tools Environment

Since the introduction of the RX MCU family in 2009, Renesas Electronics has been steadily introducing new devices, features, tools and partnerships to expand the capabilities of the MCUs. Renesas Electronics supports its RX600 MCUs with a comprehensive proprietary hardware/software tool set and with a wealth of support from its third-party partners. Renesas Electronics offers its popular High-Performance Embedded Workshop (HEW) integrated development environment (IDE), which includes the RX-optimizing C/C++ compiler with integrated support for the SEGGER JLink JTAG on-chip debugging tool, the low-cost E1 JTAG on-chip debugger as well as the comprehensive E20 high-speed trace on-chip debugging tool. Third-party support for RTOS, compilers, IDEs, middleware, communication protocol stacks, and color graphics is available from the global community of Renesas Electronics’ partner vendors.

About Renesas Electronics America Inc.

Renesas Electronics America Inc., headquartered in Santa Clara, California, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723), the world's number one supplier of microcontrollers and a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions including microcontrollers, SoC solutions, and a broad range of analog and power devices. Renesas Electronics America offers the global manufacturing capabilities of its parent company. In the Americas, Renesas Electronics America markets and sells industrial-type active-matrix LCD modules from NEC LCD Technologies, Ltd., a global leader in innovative display technologies. More information about the products offered by Renesas Electronics America can be found at http://am.renesas.com/.