Futaba

Futaba Corporation develops display equipment such as fluorescent display tubes and organic electroluminescence displays.

Futaba Corporation choosing IAR Systems’ tools for reliability and ease of use

Futaba Corporation (hereafter Futaba) develops display equipment such as fluorescent display tubes and organic electroluminescence displays. The company currently uses both Arm-based microcontrollers and Renesas Electronics’ Super H microcontrollers. Futaba is using IAR Embedded Workbench to develop the software for both these types of microcontrollers. Futaba also uses IAR Systems’ dynamic and static analysis tools.

Earthquakes and market change for display equipment triggered adoption of Arm

Futaba Corporation was established back in 1948. There are three categories that form the mainstay of the business: electronic components, electronic equipment, and production equipment. The Electronic Components Division offers products like vacuum fluorescent displays (VFD), organic electroluminescence displays (OLED), and touch panels. The Electronic Equipment Department offers products such as radio controlled devices, wireless industrial equipment, and servo motors. For example, the servo motor used in the communication robot “Robi,” which was sold as a separate part of the DeAGOSTINI Japan magazine, was supplied by Futaba. The Production Equipment Department provides products like mold bases used in resin injection molding, and die sets for metal mold pressing.

We installed a microcontroller that came equipped with an Arm Cortex-M3 back in 2012, and afterwards we generally gained experience with the Cortex-M series from using M4, M0+, and M0, respectively. Recently, we’ve been using Renesas Electronics’ RZ/A series, which come equipped with Cortex-A9 cores, for the development of our touch panel LCD products.

- Tadayoshi Umetsu

There are several reasons why Futaba decided to adopt Arm technology. One was the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. Until then, Futaba was mostly using microcontrollers made by Renesas Electronics.

After the earthquake hit in March 2011, we began questioning the risk of buying all our main components from one vendor, so we decided to take that opportunity to adopt microcontrollers from other companies.

- Tadayoshi Umetsu

The second reason for this change was when Futaba’s main product changed. Before the change, the company’s flagship was VFD products. Compared to LCDs, VFDs’ appearance is superior but its disadvantage was higher power consumption. VFDs consume a lot of power so, when a growing number of customers required power efficiency, LCDs took the market by storm. While Futaba also began developing LCD products, the fact that there was a lot of other display equipment manufacturers also selling LCD products meant that things would eventually lead to a price competition.

That is why our company decided to appraise Arm-based microcontrollers since they were, at the time, touted as being inexpensive. Atmel Corporation first adopted Arm-based microcontrollers, then STMicroelectronics, NXP, and Cypress followed. Considering the cost and user-friendliness, our company also decided to switch microcontroller vendor.

- Tadayoshi Umetsu

Securing reliability with commercial tools

The Electronic Components Department of Futaba is using IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm and IAR Embedded Workbench for Renesas Superh. Apart from this, the Electronic Equipment Department is also using IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm.

After doing some research on Arm-based microcontroller development environments, we were left with two options: Keil MDK or IAR Embedded Workbench. At that time, IAR Systems was really advertising the fact that they provided support in Japanese, so that of course was appealing to us at first. After we started using IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm, we really came to appreciate how user friendly the product is, and so we decided to purchase IAR Embedded Workbench for Renesas SH

- Tadayoshi Umetsu

For SuperH microcontrollers, Futaba used to use Renesas Electronics’ integrated development environment and other environments for development.

Futaba considered open source software for development of a demo system, but did have an issue with open source software when they tried it in actual product development. If an error occurred due to the compiler, then Futaba would have to take full responsibility.

Even though the product is a bit expensive, we decided to choose a commercial tool that comes with solid support. IAR Systems’ tools have received functional safety certification. From the perspective of the credibility of developed products, I think there’s significant difference in using officially certified and well recognized tools.

- Tadayoshi Umetsu

Seamless implementation of IAR Embedded Workbench

The product implementation process for Futaba was seamless and straight forward. 

When we first started up IAR Embedded Workbench, we thought “Can we really develop a product with such a simple screen layout?”. Renesas Electronics’ linker on HEW, for example, sets memory allocation interactively using a very graphical screen layout. IAR Systems’ linker, on the other hand, adopts a style that sets parameters using a script. I’ve gotten used to doing it like this now, but at first I was very confused.

- Tomohiro Komiyama