Cypress Korea (Country Manager Young-do Lim, www.cypress.com ) announced PSoC Designer™ 5.3, a new version of its integrated design environment (IDE) for the PSoC 1 programmable system-on-chip architecture.

The new PSoC Designer version 5.3 includes over 30 new or enhanced user modules, which are free “virtual chips” represented by icons used to integrate multiple ICs and system interfaces into a single PSoC device. Version 5.3 also includes several new features to make designing with PSoC faster and easier.

Some of the new user modules in version 5.3 include the Gas Sensing Analog Front-End (AFE), Fan Controller, Voltage Sequencer, SMBus Slave, and Thermistor Interface. These user modules can be dragged into the design like icons. These user modules are pre-tested and characterized, and each module comes with a datasheet that designers can use to customize functions for their specific designs. PSoC Designer 5.3 includes over 150 of these user modules, making PSoC 1 device design fast and easy.

In addition to new user modules, Cypress has added a new auto-routing feature that fundamentally simplifies system creation using PSoC. User-friendly additional features in PSoC Designer 5.3 include a filterable device catalog, GUI improvements, easier user module customization, and a project archiving function. Users can download PSoC Designer 5.3 for free from the website ( www.cypress.com/psocdesigner ).

"Young-do Lim, Country Manager of Cypress Korea, explained, 'PSoC Designer is an innovative concept that has transformed embedded design. The new version 5.3 includes the most significant enhancements Cypress has ever made to PSoC Designer. This enables faster and easier design than ever before with the PSoC 1 device for a wide range of applications.'"

Cypress PSoC Designer
Cypress PSoC Designer helps users leverage the performance and flexibility of PSoC 1 devices. By operating at a high level of abstraction and eliminating the need for firmware development, PSoC Designer enables new designs that allow target PSoC devices to be built, simulated, and programmed in hours or days, rather than weeks or months. Additionally, PSoC Designer provides users with a catalog of peripheral functions called “User Modules.” User Modules create a wide range of useful functions, including comparators, programmable gain blocks, filters, BoostLabLoaders, and configurable PSoC devices, as well as counters, timers, PWM, analog converters, ADCs and DACs, and communication links such as UART, SPI, and I2C. Each user module includes hardware configuration data, startup code, interrupt service routines, and a set of APIs when applicable.

Cypress PSoC capable of responding to design changes
The PSoC 1 device adopts a highly combinable system-on-chip architecture for embedded control designs, providing capabilities equivalent to flash-based field-programmable ASICs without lead-time or NRE penalties. The PSoC device integrates combinable analog and digital circuits controlled by an on-chip microcontroller, enabling enhanced design changeability and reduced component count. The PSoC device includes up to 32 Kbytes of flash memory, 2 Kbytes of SRAM, an 8x8 multiplier with a 32-bit accumulator, power and sleep monitoring circuitry, and hardware I2C communication.

Flexible PSoC digital and analog blocks enable designers to make firmware-based changes throughout the design, verification, production, and post-launch phases, ensuring that products remain future-proof. The inherent flexibility of PSoC shortens design cycle times and enables future feature enhancements. All PSoC devices are also dynamically reconfigurable, allowing designers to modify internal resources while utilizing fewer components to perform a given task.

A single PSoC device can integrate over 100 peripheral functions while reducing customer design time, board space, and power consumption, while improving system quality and lowering system costs. For more information regarding PSoC products, please refer to ( www.cypress.com/psoc ). In addition, information regarding free online training can be found at ( www.cypress.com/psoctraining ).